


Things You Keep to Yourself

by crystalsexarch



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Angst, Blow Jobs, Friends With Benefits, Hand Jobs, Horny Catboy Problems, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Masturbation, Pining, Pre-ARR, Pre-Canon, Real Scholar Hours, Under-Desk Blow Jobs, We're Going Through ARR Now Aren't We, and...feelings?, read and find out, risk of getting caught:))), slow...burn...?, very bad scholars, very sassy catboys...
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:48:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21539263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crystalsexarch/pseuds/crystalsexarch
Summary: Pre-ARR. Pre-everything. G'raha Tia was a scholar first and foremost, and a rather precocious one at that. Thus, his fellow student (and future WoL?) comes to give him hell (and maybe something else?) for being so darn responsible....at least that's how this started. Now it's become a canon of its own in which the Warrior of Light and G'raha Tia knew each other before everything changed.Chapter Ten - T- We get a glimpse of the life Bas'ir's mother led, and later Minfilia gets a glimpse as well.
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Original Character(s), G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 64
Kudos: 119





	1. Things You Keep to Yourself - E

**Author's Note:**

> Ask my about the beautiful, wonderful, blessed, cursed Exarch Discord if you like. It stays poppin' bro.

The deliberate, slow footsteps that had carried down the halls stopped just at Raha’s doorway. And since the only person the young scholar expected a visit from that afternoon was not like to have good intentions, he kept his head down even as his ears pricked forward. If he were to properly fulfill his advisory responsibilities, he needed to organize his borrowed work space before taking time to fraternize with a certain Keeper of the Moon.

But that Keeper would not relent in his presence. Practically looming over the desk, Raha tried to concentrate on his search instead of the figure in the door. _Where is that damn key?_ he thought. _How can I evaluate work I can’t even access?_

After turning over the same stacks, looking under the same arcane-objects-turned-paperweights, Raha realized he’d never be able to work with _that man’s_ beady little eyes upon him. He looked up.

“So. It’s come to this,” Bas’ir Bahani said from his casual position against the door jamb. From side to side his tail swayed, belying the tricky scowl on his face. He was about the same height as Raha, made taller only by the formal shoes he wore, but slighter of frame, paler and with dark blue hair - something he was rumored throughout the halls of academia to spend hours maintaining. That rumor, Raha knew to be true.

“Come to what, exactly?” Raha asked.

“The teacher’s pet has become the teacher.” His eyebrows danced high with a wave of his hand. Despite the temperate climate, Bas’ir wore a scarf (indoors, no less) and a long-sleeved turtleneck (in the summer). “And you’re leaving your good friend behind.”

“Which one, exactly?”

“What do you expect them to call you? _Professor Tia_?”

Raha scrunched his nose and went back to searching the desk. Everything he needed sat in a locked drawer, if he could just find the key he hadn’t thought to ask for earlier. “I tire of your willful ignorance.”

“You think you’re better than I am just because you’ve got an office and a desk now, hmm? Your own little place to - “

“Please.” Raha set his palms on the edge and leaned forward, eyes dark. With sunlight filtering in from the window at his back, he fancied his muscles may actually have looked a bit impressive...not that that had _anything_ to do with his choice of accommodations. Sure, a fair few elder scholars had offered him their offices, but it was pure coincidence he had chosen the one with natural lighting. “If I think any less of you, consider that your own doing.”

A few moments passed in which Bas’ir stood, blinked, considered how seriously he should take this handsome, wholesome man...and finally rolled his eyes. “My, how tough you must think you look with your archer’s arms. If you spent half as much time studying as you do flexing before your mirror, I bet they’d have given you a bigger desk.”

One hefty sigh later, Raha decided to abandon his search and recline. The chair smelled like dust and was far too big for him, but at least he’d been able to adjust the height so his feet could touch the ground. “You know it’s not really _my_ office, yes?”

Bas’ir uncrossed his arms and approached with a pace far slower than his tongue. “Sure.” When he reached the desk, he slid his finger over the dark grooves in the wood and thought of home...then rubbed the thought off on his scarf.

“They’re just letting me use it when I - “

“Yes,” he said. “But you’re the one sitting in the chair now. So would you like to make use of it?” His lips curled over his fangs. How delightful he found Raha ‘s inability to keep his back straight at that, his cheeks un-reddened.

“Is this not...how you use chairs, Bas’ir?” He rubbed his forehead. “You must be aware: this is why they offered _me_ the position.”

“I think you have the right to break it in, make it your own.” He knocked his fist on the wood and cocked his head at the sound. “This is actually quite spacious…”

Raha ran his knuckles over his lips, wishing he had the strength to say something ridiculous like _Oh, I’ll break_ you _in_ and still take himself seriously. With Bas’ir in his current state, he knew he couldn’t get away with it. Instead, Raha sighed. “Listen, friend. For the next moon, I must stay in this office for just _two bells_ twice a week. If you could accommodate that in your _very tight schedule_ I’d very much appreciate it.”

“Hmm. My schedule is plenty tight.” He leaned against the wood with his tail swishing over the surface, tousling a paper here and there. In profile, the mischief of his eyes was not so bright. With his hand on his chin he looked nigh pensive, like he actually thought about anything other than being the most beautiful mistake he could. “I just wanted to visit you on your first day.”

“As I thought you would. And I appreciate it.” Raha took the lull as opportunity to resume his search, fingering the inside of the desk, checking for irregularities, hidden compartments, anything of note against the old wood. The idea of returning to his mentor with his tail between his legs - no work done, no commentary left, and an embarrassing question on his lips - made him sweat. He’d have to fix this problem on his own or find a roundabout solution that didn’t involve blowing the lock off or otherwise dismantling the desk.

“Need help?” Bas’ir came around to the back of the room and squatted like an imp. “What are you looking for exactly?”

“Ah, well. I had forgotten to ask where - “

“My, it _is_ spacious down here.” He poked his head under, bracing himself with a hand on the chair. Liking what he saw, he flattened his ears and turned to smirk.

Raha, to his credit, only let his eyebrow twitch once. “What? You think I’m going to stop you just because you’ve left the door open?” He took a stack of papers and straightened them on the edge of the desk - not because he needed to. Just for flair. “At this point in my academic career, I’m above wrangling you.”

“Yes, yes, how mature of you to let someone like _me_ muss about between your legs.” Bas’ir’s tail slithered after him into the darkness. Keeping his knees to his chest, he eyed his fellow’s thighs with suspicion. “That decision may come back to haunt you.”

Raha crossed his ankles to keep them out of the way. “Let me know if you find anything down there.”

“I...may have…”

“Hm?”

About two seconds later, Raha knew he should have expected the man to jokingly palm at his intimates. When he did, he scooted the chair back with a little grunt and peered beneath the desk, red-faced but serious.

“What?” Bas’ir said with foolish, blinking eyes, hand at the edge of his seat.

“Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

“...fine.” Glancing at the open door, Raha pursed his lips, undid his belt, the clasp of his trousers, and produced his semi-alert member from his smallclothes, calling the other man’s bluff.

Bas’ir’s eyes widened at the sight. “Raha, if I’m honest...that didn’t take much convincing.”

“I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“...no, you certainly don’t.” For a moment, he kept his hands to himself and his eyes on the prize. _Is he calling my bluff? Am I bluffing?_ “Well...scoot back, if you would.”

“You said you didn’t mind.”

“Lower the chair.”

“I...I can’t be certain whether it goes any lower.”

Bas’ir leaned forward and fiddled with the seat to no avail, consigning instead to pull it closer. Turns out he didn’t _need_ it lower. The desk was high enough he reckoned he could fit his head where it needed to be...if he dared take that path. He was a lot of talk. A _lot_ of talk...but every now and then he simply had to put his money where his mouth was...or his _mouth_ where his mouth was, as it happened. “Raha.”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to...do this, then.”

“Okay.”

He edged into position, peering up just once more to see Raha looking straight ahead with his eyebrows low. “During your office hours?” Bas'ir asked.

“See if I care. No one will be coming by this first day, anyhow.” He crossed his arms on the desk and bowed his head. Anyone who passed the room would have thought him sleeping.

He coiled his fingers around Raha’s cock, warm and fully erect by now. Bas’ir felt a bit hot from embarrassment and his own arousal. “You sound confident.”

Raha twisted his lips to keep his friend from hearing him gasp at the sensation. This was good. This was _very_ good. Good enough to make him grind his thumbnails into the skin of his knuckles. And this man had barely started. “As do you, for someone hiding under a desk.”

“ _Hiding?_ ” Bas’ir pulled away, kept only his thumb at Raha’s cock. “Would you prefer I make my way elsewhere?”

He winced, thankful the cover of his arms hid the heat of his face. “N-no...you may...remain there. For now.”

“Hm. For now.” Bas’ir took a deep breath and rode his tongue from Raha’s base and up before stroking with a bit more vigor.

Raha inhaled sharply, cursed under his breath “Have you done something like this before?”

“Gotten you off?”

“No.” He held his breath and let a few more beats pass. “Something...risky like this.”

“No.” Bas’ir rubbed himself through his clothes. A contradiction, he was eager to please his friend but loathe to undo his own trousers, as though that would spare him from suspicion should someone interrupt. “Have you?”

“Would I have done this with…” A grunt cut off his words. “Anyone but you?”

“I’d hope not.” His tail thumped against the desk. “Will you come?”

“Maybe if you...use your mouth…”

“You’re sure the heavy risk isn’t stimulating enough on its own?”

It _was_ stimulating, Raha hated to admit. He pushed out the air in his lungs and reconfigured his position, hips forward, forehead in his hands like he was confronting a great problem. Best to put some literature in front of his face, too, just in case. The part of his brain that sought pleasure had eclipsed the part that wanted so badly to be a good little scholar. Now, instead of thinking _we shouldn’t do this_ he thought _if we do this once we will surely do it again_. “Please.”

Bas’ir bit his lip and pressured his erection harder. Maybe he would cave and free himself after all. How rapturously good it felt to be wanted by this man, if only carnally, and only for a moment. Keeping his hand at Raha’s base, he lapped around his tip before taking him in.

“Oh, _gods…_ ”

The little sounds Raha made lit a fire in Bas’ir’s hungry heart. The sound of footsteps lit a fire in his brain. A hand on his shoulder urged against his initial instinct of pulling away. The chair scooted farther in, urging the Keeper, cock in his mouth, a bit farther back into the darkness.

Raha found himself looking straight at a bespectacled Auri historian he recognized from his mentor’s lecture that day. She hadn’t spoken or asked any questions, but had scratched notes the entire time. Now, like then, she was stone-faced and carrying a bag loaded far over capacity. “You are Master Minoir’s assistant, are you not?”

“Y-yes, that’s me.”

Bas’ir could just make out the conversation with his ears cocked to the side. Seeing as he had nothing better to do, he eased himself up and down, minding his lashing. If they were going to get caught, it’d be of his own ignorance, not his tail’s.

“G’raha Tia?”

“That’s right. I didn’t catch your name?”

She answered, but Bas’ir couldn’t hear, seeing as he was focused on flushing this man’s face, or perhaps making him bang his fist against the table if he could. Seeing no other course of action, he brought his tongue into the mix...and slipped his hand beneath the band of his own trousers.

Raha faked a cough and pulled at Bas’ir’s shirt. The Seeker was smiling, but otherwise proud of how normal he thought he looked. “Is there aught with which I might help you?”

The Au Ra shifted her weight. Ever poker-faced, even if she suspected something strange was afoot, Raha figured he would not have been able to detect it. “I simply wanted to introduce myself. I am shy to ask questions before my comrades, but have plenty to ask.”

“Ah…” It was less of an acknowledgement and more a poorly hidden gasp of pleasure. One he _hoped_ Bas’ir hadn’t noticed.

But Bas’ir _had_ noticed and thought deeply on it, working for his own pleasure and - more importantly - Raha’s. If he could just make him squeak or jump or shake - that would satisfy him for many moons.

Raha clasped his hands at his forehead and looked down at the sheet he’d lain on his desk, exhaling.

“Is something wrong?” the Au Ra asked, leaning forward a bit.

The Seeker mumbled something. He knew she’d ask for clarity, but he had to make a decision first. A decision he made by wringing his fingers in Bas’ir’s hair and pushing him down hard, so hard he thought the man might gag. _And if he does, he deserves it_. The pleasure gave him goose skin and he wiped his bangs from his forehead to distract his guest from his quivering lip. _What in seven hells am I doing_?

Despite his questions, Raha cleared his throat. “Yes, er, actually - if you’ve plans to see Master Minoir would you tell him he’s left me without a certain key I need?”

She tilted her head. “I’ve just been to see him, but I’m certain he hasn’t gone far.” She gestured over her shoulder. “I would be happy to ask him, if you’re busy.”

Raha tensed his legs and lowered his head, trying not to snarl at this poor, poor scholar. “Just. Pondering a particularly troublesome puzzle of our field.”

Bas’ir tried to stay quiet, fully convinced now he could make this man come if he tried hard enough. Raha’s knee hit the side of the desk, and the new position gave him the leverage he needed to just _slightly_ edge his hips back and forth into Bas’ir’s ministrations. The Keeper had to admit he was not only impressed but _enthralled_. Up to this point the boldest thing he’d seen Raha do was challenge a traveling adventurer to a shooting contest. And now he was getting ready to come in front of an ignorant stranger?

The girl bowed her head. “I’ll return shortly, then.”

Raha grunted, perhaps a bit too obviously. “Mm. If I’m not here upon your arrival p - pray return the key to Minoir, would you?”

“Of course.”

When she turned, Raha put his other hand on Bas’ir’s head and waited long enough for her to pass through the doorway, glowing eyes minding the eccentric just once more, before he scooted the chair back and thrusted in and out of the Keeper’s mouth as hard as he’d wanted to, panting with every fuck, halfway standing. By the time he came, his leg muscles burned from the strain.

Bas’ir groaned around his cock and slowed his pace before lolling his tongue about once more and swallowing what he had _happily_ received. Sweat pooled at his neck. He should _not_ have worn a scarf.

Raha pulled away when he was ready and fell back in his chair, covering the upper part of his face. His companion wiped his mouth and whispered. “Are you all right?”

He only shook his head and fixed his member, his button, his buckle. For a while he sat there, just breathing. No sounds filtered from the hallway, but he wasn’t sure he would have noticed them anyway. Bas’ir felt like some kind of creature at his position but dared not move. For all his jabs, he couldn’t help but admire Raha’s physical appearance...those arms of his in particular...and since the Seeker was covering his eyes, that gave him plenty of time to gawk without giving him the satisfaction of being gawked at. Eventually, Raha stood and made for the door.

Bas’ir crawled out from under the desk and poked his head over the side. “Is everything all right?”

No answer. Just wood to wood, a click, and suddenly their public spot became a bit more private. Thankfully, Bas’ir had time enough to stand and remove his scarf before Raha came back to the desk and coaxed him backwards onto it. Clumsy hands knocked over one of those ugly paperweights. Bas’ir turned to look, but Raha grabbed his chin and forced his gaze forward. “I saw what you were doing,” he said with a pout.

“What I was doing?” Bas’ir tried to keep a straight face, failed.

“Trying to please yourself _and_ humiliate me if you could?”

“Well! Aren’t you bold today.”

“Selfish, don’t you think?” He let go of his chin and crossed his arms, wondering how good a show he was putting on. “...still hard, then?”

“Hpmh.” He twisted his lips and flared his ears back. “Well, yeah.”

“And I’m sure you expect me to do something about it?”

Had it happened earlier, Bas’ir would have protested or sassed or fought or squirmed his way around the question. Hoping he _maybe_ still had the energy to wear his facade, he offered a fang-graced grin. “Well, it’s...it’s only fair.”

Raha kissed him - something they did not often do - and placed his hands over the other man’s, only to lift them and guide them to his center.

The hint was taken. Bas’ir looked to the side and freed himself, ready for something - but certainly not for the strong arms that urged him from the desk and turned him around. “Wha - “

“ _I’m_ not going to use my mouth,” Raha said, leaning into him and reaching around his waist.

“Oh! Ah…”

Bas’ir craned over the desk, backing his hips up, clenching his eyes shut. He knew it wouldn’t take much, and that was probably another thing Raha could hold against him, if he wanted. But for now he held just his _body_ against him and jerked him off. His knees were shaking already.

“Bas’ir,” Raha said, right at his neck.

“Y-yes, my friend…”

“You are...turning me into a pervert.”

“You say that like this is the first time you’ve had me bent over a desk.”

“Well…” Raha set his other hand at the base of Bas’ir’s tail and pressured down. “This is the first it’s been a desk not properly owned by one of us.”

“Mm.” Thoughts of past encounters brought him even closer. Would that they could have owned a desk together, shared a room perhaps. “Breaking it in.”

Raha still couldn’t bring himself to use his embarrassing joke, but he knew he could bring this man to bliss. Once he’d run his tail all the way to its end, he caught the back of his head and pushed his face down onto the wood, the papers. _Yes_ he felt a little bad about it...but he felt much better when Bas’ir groaned his name.

“Raha…I...” Tongue pitched at his lip’s corner, he could hardly speak through his pleasure. “I’m...sorry for…”

“Sorry for what?”

“For making fun...of your arms.” His tail tensed around Raha’s thigh, in time with his uneasy breathing. “You use them _very_ effectively.”

The Seeker couldn’t help but blush a little. “Well...focus on my hand instead.”

He _was_ focusing. He was focusing on each stroke, each pulse of pleasure, the pressure on his back and building in his knees. He was focusing on the strength that strained against him and wondered how it would feel to be properly _held_ by those selfsame arms, and he wondered if he would, perhaps, have found the answer, had he not danced around so many opportunities, like he’d danced away from Gridania. It _pained_ him to think on how easy it was to _fuck_ somebody, to _get fucked_ and never have the courage to conjure up something deeper than rapture, rapture, rapture…

Bas’ir’s knee knocked into the wood. He was tearing up. “I’m going to...soon…”

“Please do.”

“Shall we...move about a bit?”

“I think not.”

He breathed in and held it, trying not to let go in more than one way. “Oh _gods_ \- at least just - please, let me - in your mouth - “

“After the respect you’ve shown me?”

A finger, then another crept over his lips, forced his head back, eyes to the ceiling. “P-please. Don’t make me.” Quieter, next. An earnest plea? Or just a step closer to bliss? After all, Raha was giving him what he’d wanted all along: something strained and electric and earned. _This_ experience was one he had fought for, one he would think of in his loneliest hours, when his dear friend inevitably tired of him. As he spoke the words, his eyes rolled back. “ _Don’t...make me…_ ”

Raha nipped the exposed skin of his neck and lingered until he felt come on his fingers. But even then he didn’t stop stroking. He smiled into his associate’s skin and kept at it, kept working his slick cock like he hadn’t noticed - when finally Bas’ir’s hips started jerking back against him with each repetition.

“Th-th-th-that’s e - “

“Enough?” Raha stopped but didn’t let go until he’d kissed the pink spot his teeth had left.

“More than, in fact…”

A knock at the door. Both sets of ears turned accordingly, but nothing else moved.

Bas’ir opened his mouth first but was slow to speak. “A moment,” Raha called. He caressed his friend’s cheek. “We’ve an unfortunate mess to clean up.”

“Won’t you come...come over tonight?” Bas’ir said, nuzzling Raha’s hand like a pitiful kit. “If you can fit that in your...very tight schedule.”

Raha almost cracked in anticipation of the absurd response he’d come up with. The past bell’s events had put him exactly where he needed to be if he wanted to make a stupid joke. Thank the gods, he kept his laughter in until he could spit it out. “I’ll fit in _your_ very tight schedule.”


	2. Things You Keep in the Dark - E

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter Two - E** \- G'raha Tia accepts his friend's offer and finds his visit will not be any more productive than his evening at the office.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops I wrote more. Sue me.

Bas’ir had been upside down for a while before the blood in his head started to get to him. His neck curved around his bed frame, meaning his eyes pointed more or less directly at his desk, which Raha occupied. The scholar had _not_ finished evaluating works in his designated hours. And, Bas’ir thought, there was a chance he could meet similar delays as a direct result of his decision to take the Keeper up on his invitation.

Cruel, craving thoughts kept Bas’ir occupied in lieu of conversation: _This fool really ought to know by now, the way I feel._ Sex was one thing. Spending happy bells in silence was another entirely. As surely as Bas’ir noted the honesty of Raha’s tail, Raha should have noticed how his friend’s actions betrayed him. _I want to be with you_ they said, shouted, screamed. But perhaps that was part of the Seeker’s idealistic nature, giving shadowed feelings the dignity of being overlooked.

All affection aside - there was something chemical about sharing a space, even for a bell or two, with an intimate partner. Bas’ir could only roll into so many positions before he needed someone to roll with, and Raha read so many pages before his eyes grew heavy with fatigue or something seedy. After staring dumbly at the Seeker for an eternity and a half, Bas’ir caved and put his hands on Raha’s shoulders, turned the chair around so he could set his knee between his legs. “Nigh finished?” he said.

“No,” came the answer, short and dark, breathy and breaking. A knuckles-to-the-wall sound that served as confirmation - neither of them had quite escaped the lusty biological tension that so often drove them to be together.

Bas’ir inhaled with his eyes closed. He swore he could smell the Seeker’s hair, his sweat, his history, perhaps - the entropic burn of Allag in his essence. All he needed was the word and he’d have held him forever, as long as he needed, or longer. “I want to…”

“Yes.”

The click of a quill to the floor, the bump of the chair back into the desk at the addition of Bas’ir’s weight - it wasn’t pretty, trying to fit two small men into a seat designed for one larger one. Even less pretty, how they couldn’t even get their shirts off, could barely think about it before -

“Gah!”

“Oh _gods. Keep doing that_.”

Bas’ir grunted and held his tongue on his right fang, concentrating to find that spot again. Dulled as the sensation was by fabric, grinding over their clothes made him hot from the inside out, made his spine week. It was the thought, the concept, the _I want this so bad I can’t be bothered to strip him down._ Hands half-tied in Raha’s shirt, he worked against him until the Seeker gasped and called out:

“Bed.”

Raha pushed, Bas’ir pulled and the latter ended up on top, leg-locked with his clothes on, hardness to hardness. Finally, he managed to wrangle the Seeker’s tank from him and set his hands on his well-formed chest, smooth and hot. When he placed his thumbs at his nipples, Raha groaned.

“This is so...stupid,” Bas’ir said, inescapably enraptured.

No words from the Seeker, but plenty of push. He brought his heels onto the bed and drove down into the mattress, wrapped his hands around his partner’s ass and squeezed.

His strength colored Bas’ir’s face even more, and he made a decision. “This time...fuck me.”

“Fuck _you_?” Hands rode up the Keeper’s back, edged his shirt to his head. “Are you going to beg.”

“No.” He lifted his arms, finished the job, and set his palms on Raha’s cheeks. “I’m going to bite you until you’ve no choice but to fight back.”

A sunny laugh that sounded out of place in the bedroom - “Ohoh? Try me.”

With a happy sigh, Bas’ir fell upon the Seeker’s collarbone and let his teeth glide across like a paintbrush. This was his art, this was something he felt confident in offering. His fang hitched tight at the sternum. “Want me to draw blood?”

“You’ll not.”

“Not without permission.” Where he wanted to go was down, but he had restraint enough to save his favorite spots for last. Instead, he found the tattoo on Raha’s right shoulder, nipped along the lines and made believe he could taste its power. Perhaps he could. From there he slipped along the arm and bit the soft skin of his inner elbow.

“Ah!”

“Troubled?”

“Please...keep going.”

He sucked at the same spot and kissed it before shifting to Raha’s hip bones. Like a right bastard, he locked eyes with the Seeker and pinched goose flesh between his teeth.

Raha’s mouth opened wide. “You...you make it look like it feels so good.”

“It _does_.” He reared forward and locked his teeth to Raha’s neck.

“I’d like to try.”

His tail curled, eyes danced to the side. “Oh?”

Bas’ir was nowhere near done with his ritual - but that was it. Raha surged beneath him, tossed him over with a cocky laugh. “Where am I supposed to start?”

“You were _supposed_ to let me finish.”

“Then I’ll pick up where you left off.” The first foray at his neck felt clumsy, innocent. More tongue than fang, more wet than sting.

Bas’ir flushed nonetheless. “You’d be better off with teeth like mine.”

“Hmph. Well, I know something that’s sure to please a creature like you.”

“No. You won’t.”

But of course he would. Bas’ir arched his back at the first sign of sensation at his nipple. A finger, then a flicking tongue, then pressure at his other - there was something so _wrong_ about it, something that had always bothered and fascinated him. A secret that, once realized, was always held against him...to his great pleasure. So stupid. So _embarrassing._ Once he was past the initial surge, he cried out. “Fine - fine! I am at your every mercy.”

“Just as you requested.”

____________

They fucked. They fucked, they touched, they rolled about until finally, half-drained, they cleaned each other and laid in bed with their foreheads together, tails thumping the mattress in contentment. Bas’ir rubbed his cheek against Raha’s. “Will you wake early to finish your work?” he said, a bit hoarse, a bit timid.

“Mayhap,” Raha said, just as hoarse, just as timid. Leaning into the gesture, his ear flicked against his companion’s. “I feel as though I could use more sleep than usual, if anything.”

“Mm. One of those nights.”

“One of those _days_.” A playful jab to the Keeper’s arm; one that lingered, became a soft hold on his elbow. “Lest you forget this started long before I entered your quarters.”

A warm smile. “As I recall, you didn’t enter my quarters until very recently.”

Raha put all the weight of an eye roll into the sound of a sigh. Nonetheless, his voice was sweet like song. “I very much enjoy these nights together...much as I ought to be working.”

He tried to breathe normally...failed. “What?”

“What what?”

“I mean _what_...do you mean?”

“I mean what I mean.” He stretched his arms out and purred. “For all your sour faces, you are an excellent companion.”

The sentiment moshed about his brain and finally measured net neutral. No expression. “As are you.” He turned away and let his arm dangle off the mattress. He’d sooner set himself on fire than let the truth burn out. Should circumstances have been just a tad different, he could have reached over and kissed the man until his heart sat correctly. Raha would have squeezed him tight and whispered sweet, or bitter things into his ears. _I see right through you, my favorite friend and foremost love_.

As he often did, Bas'ir ran through their first contact and tried to pinpoint the moment he'd become something other than honest. Perhaps from the very beginning, when he dismissed the precocious scholar’s marks for any and all reasons. _He’s been here longer than I. He studies more. Master so-and-so is biased. It’s his eye, it’s his damn eye._ And to make matters worse - no matter how outwardly disdainful, how abrasive, how _rude_ he colored his remarks, Raha took him as a fellow. Raha sought collaboration, mutual scholarly respect, he sought nights spent pouring over tomes, brainstorming with an honored peer. There were only so many excuses Bas’ir could muster, even with his practiced tongue, before he acceded...and only so many nights he could spend in close quarters with such a beautiful man before they devolved into far less academic unions.

It had been perhaps a quarter bell of quiet when Raha turned over and pressed his bare chest to Bas'ir's bare back. A strong arm slipped around and landed just above the Keeper's navel. Already, he could feel another _damned_ erection - two, if you counted the one pressing into his rear - threatening to keep him from sleep. Being young, being Miqo'te, being around his favorite person was such a chore, such a filthy and beautiful chore.

Acquiescing to the silent demand, he shuffled his smallclothes as needed and not a moment later felt a warm hand at his cock. Raha exhaled like he'd been holding his breath since they first reclined. With his tongue teasing at Bas'ir's neck, he jerked him like a man trying to keep a secret.

Bas'ir let him keep that secret for a second, just until a bead of sweat trickled from his forehead to the sheet. Careful not to interrupt his own pleasure, he rolled onto his back and palmed at Raha until he found what he needed. They had both been worked raw a couple ways that evening, but nature had it that they each had at least a bit more endurance to spare.

Raha was the first to speak, but only did so after a chest-shaking sigh. “I knew we would do this.”

“Aye, as did I.” Bas'ir nuzzled closer to his chest, set his lips at his nipple. He’d be able to come soon, but wanted to wait, wanted to feel Raha’s pleasure first if he could. “Let it happen.”

“Oh I....I will.” He nuzzled his chin at Bas’ir’s temple and inhaled like his lungs would accept only the air they shared. “But you...you have to let it happen, too.”

Bas’ir mumbled, groaned, let his tongue onto Raha’s chest, stroked his friend faster to distract himself from how unwillingly close he’d come to his own release.

“Come for me,” the Seeker said.

“N-no...you come for me.”

“I did what you asked earlier. Now you.” He ran his free hand through Bas’ir’s hair, found the base of his ears with his fingers and pressed. “My friend.”

Craning his neck, he looked at Raha through lust-burnt eyes. With that red, that green in his gaze, those wet lips parted - the Keeper’s hand stopped. He would lose and he would lose every time with his fingers curling at his chest, his tail taut, twisting with the strained rhythm of his hips. Even this additional, lazy orgasm brought tears to his eyes, sent his frame shaking into Raha’s. His frozen lips held the shadow of a sound that could’ve caught the breadth of his feelings by the tail and dragged them brutally out into the open, naked, shaking, orphaned.

Bas’ir swallowed that shadow while Raha finished him off. “So good,” the Seeker said, still wanting, hardly allowing a moment before he rose and straddled Bas'ir and took himself in hand.

The Keeper groaned with one eye open. "I can - I can do that for you "

Raha scrunched his face and kept stroking. "No. Nope. Not this time."

"I can - "

A hand clamped over his mouth. Raha's eyes grew crazy. His tail whipped side to side. "You've no choice in the matter, my tricky little friend."

Bas'ir produced three coherent thoughts ahead of Raha's messy orgasm: first, that the man certainly could have come up with something less contrived to say. Second, that he could have said much, much worse and Bas'ir would still have worshiped the ground he tread upon. And third - the sight of him finding pleasure on his chest - and then lurching forward, all bright-eyed in the dark, to examine his handiwork when he’d drawn up all he could muster - _that_ was one the Keeper would commit to memory and ponder time and time again.

“Oh my,” Raha sang, taking his hand from his companion’s mouth. “Would that be it, then? Or shall we go about it once more?”

“Gods...no...we must sleep before - “

“Before - yes, indeed.”

“I end up inside - well.”

“Yes.”

A few moments of open-mouthed breathing, closed-eye silence. Then Raha spoke again through a drowsy laugh.

“That venture we shall save for the morrow.”

“That is, if you ever wrap up evaluations. Pesky students...” Bas’ir raised his head from the bed to examine the damage. “Well, I cleaned up my mess in your _office_ , so I assume you’ll take care of yours?”

A surprise kiss caught his forehead, then his lips - where it lingered. When Raha pulled away, the warmth of summer sunlight ebbed from his smile. “I’d have it no other way. Though recall, friend, you’ve just done a number yourself.”

Bas’ir twisted his lips and looked to the side with low brows. “You sound...far too sweet for someone who just - “

“Nonsense. You deserve my every kindness and more.” He danced away to retrieve a preliminary means of cleansing.

Bas’ir rubbed his forehead and mumbled. “Keep talking to me like that and I’ll get the wrong idea…” Or the right one. Or the ruinous one.

For the second - third? - time that day, they put themselves in good order and curled up on the bed. Bas’ir was never very good at sleeping: nightmares. Most nights they shared, he woke with a shudder and mumbled a hastily drafted excuse for why he needed to rest his head on Raha’s chest. And Raha, for his part, never listened to the excuse - just nodded and scratched the back of the Keeper’s head until his breathing grew easy.

But there were a few reasons Bas’ir loved nightmares. One: they presented him with physical embodiments of very real but abstract fears. They taught him something about himself the same way picture books taught death to children. Two: they were self-explanatory. Nightmare, one could say, and suddenly hot tears made sense with no elaboration. Three: nightmares were yet dreams. And if Bas'ir dreamt, he was almost certain to catch glimpses of the man he loved...sometimes glimpses he would cherish, sometimes sights he would hold close and shudder at, thinking _this. You must not let this happen. In the waking world, find a way_

A way to _what_ he wasn’t sure. He was never sure. But whatever it was he hated it for the way it broke his nights...and loved it for the way it let him put them back together.

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he heard Raha’s voice once again.

“You’re awake, aren’t you?”

“...how did you know?”

He chuckled. “I can feel your eyelashes when you blink.”

Bas’ir tried to raise himself, but Raha’s arm kept him down. “I’m sorry, I’ll...just close my eyes then.”

A low laugh came from the Seeker. Bas’ir may have missed had he not been flush against his chest. The man holding him was someone he’d fucked, been fucked by...but the idea of curling fingers around his neck felt so debauched he could hardly feel his fingers at all.

“Should I sing for you?”

“W-what? Why?”

“I’m able and willing.”

_No_ , Bas’ir wanted to say. _That is something a lover would do._ But then - is that not what he dreamt of so often? To be something more than the chemical answer? Only a cruel man would accept such an offer and have his friend carve himself to fit the mold of love, lover, beloved. Only a selfish, rotten, little man.

“Yes,” Bas’ir said, clenching his eyes shut. The grip he wound around Raha’s torso was shy, hungry, guilty, the ghost of something much fiercer he once again tried and failed to swallow completely.


	3. Things That Keep Your Eyes Open - T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter three - T** Bas'ir gets some troubling news.

Bayard was shirking his duties near the edge of a clearing he knew for a fact you couldn’t see from atop Amarissaix's Spire. Between his lips rolled a sharp little thing - in taste, not texture - a friend of a friend had brought him from the Far East. Hingashi, supposedly. Not easy to come by. Not something he wanted to smoke in front of others, but something he felt perfectly fine lighting up in his hidden place.

He squatted and leaned against a thick old tree, let the smoke roll from his lips. That little pleasure, _just_ colored with a hint of misplaced derring-do - how _dare_ he put the Twelveswood at risk by _enjoying a cigar_ , of all things - that pleasure was enough to push him to the end of his shift. This was his favorite part of the day.

Something shuffled at the treeline. Eyes wide, hand hovering over lance, he looked left, looked right. “Who’s there?”

No reply came, but an off-white something caught his eye. A flurry of shaking leaves. A poacher? A beast? Worst of all - one of his superiors? Fingers closed around steel. He flicked his cigar to the corner of his lip. “Oy. Who’s there?”

Squinting, he saw what looked like a shimmer of light, a shadow not quite a shadow. Then, popped from the bushes an impish little face. A child, he realized, a Keeper donned in worn wool. And from this child’s lips came an immediate _hiss_.

Bayard held his half-alert posture and blinked.

“Bas’ir!” A sharp, ragged voice from beyond. “Quit ogling. We must be about.”

The child scrunched his nose up and continued ogling.

Something about it pissed Bayard off. He leaned back against the tree. _Keepers. The less I see of them, the better. At least they're not like to share my secret_. “Go on, then. Listen to your mum.”

An ugly, cursed look followed by a second hiss, longer than the first. Perhaps the Elezen would’ve offered harsher words to follow suit, but a woman stalked after the child and pinched his ears.

“No more dallying, child.” With cold eyes, she regarded their watcher. Deep wrinkles lined her pale, painted face. “At my side from now on.” She urged him by the shoulder, and while he did follow, his eyes stayed behind. Bayard regarded the strange pair until they slipped too deep into the woods for him to spy or even hear.

_Bas’ir_ , had she said? Bayard tried the math on his head, then his fingers. It didn’t make any sense. Bas’ _ir_? He’d never come across a Keeper boy with a name like that.

First “a,” then “to,” then...was it “li?” Or “ra?” In any case, he was quite certain it wasn’t “ir,” which meant this child - was he supposed to be the fifth - the _sixth son_ of some long-suffering Miqo’te? Perhaps that was the reason his mother - if he had the right of it - looked so much older than she ought for one with a child so young.

And where were the other children? Not just the boys, but...statistically, shouldn't there have been a gaggle of girls as well?

Ah, well. It was none of his business. He returned his attention to nothing in particular but the money he wasted between his lips.

__________________

Raha woke not with a jump or a flinch, but with a simple opening of eyes pointed at the knots in the ceiling. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to find pictures in the wood. A bird, he’d see there, a flower elsewhere. This specific ceiling, he had long ago memorized, so often had he viewed it under similar circumstances, but still he wondered if he might come up with some new ideas. It was one of very few activities he might work at without pulling his arm out from under Bas’ir, regaining feeling and freedom...but at what cost? The man slept poorly enough he’d have felt awful for waking him.

Muted blue light at the window told Raha he’d woken with a fair few bells before he was expected to do anything, which meant he had plenty time to do that which he ought to have already done. The remaining papers sat in a petty stack upon the desk, neat and taunting. But he wanted this man to get his rest.

He wondered...what had been troubling Bas’ir last night?

Even now, his friend looked moments away crying out. As he slept, he clenched his right hand around his left elbow like a tourniquet. When Raha leaned to kiss his sweat-wet forehead, a sound turned his ears towards the door...though quiet words also leaked from Bas’ir’s lips. Words unnoticed.

“My friend,” Raha whispered. “Someone is knocking at your door.”

The Keeper’s eyes flicked open.

“Shall I…?”

“What time is it.” Bas’ir ripped himself from the covers and prodded at the bedside table. After a few clumsy tugs, he freed his tail and sent it whipping to and fro.

Raha leaned back on his elbows. “I’ve yet to check, but it must be early. I’d not - “

The knocker knocked again. Bas’ir rubbed his arm, then his forehead, then stood and spun about trying to find enough clothes to answer. “Who in Seven Hells knocks this early…”

Raha watched him right himself and head down the hallway. From his position, he could only hear the door crack open, not see it. Whatever the visitor said, they said softly. In his partner’s absence, Raha found a pair of shorts - his own? Bas’ir’s? No matter - and slinked to the desk. Nary a moment after he picked up a page, the door slammed. Raha’s tail twitched. Setting the paper down, he stepped to the side and awaited his friend’s return.

But it didn’t happen quickly. _Nothing_ happened for a long time, so long that Raha started to wonder if Bas’ir hadn’t just slipped outside the door in a hurry. When he finally heard footsteps, they were soft, slow, either tired or troubled.

Without uncrossing his arms, the Keeper shivered onto the bed and lay like a corpse, eyes glazed over and pointed up at the same knots Raha had spent the past quarter bell examining. This was no simple matter, Raha realized. These first few moments, post-something, would color Bas’ir’s experience moving forward with whatever sorrow had entered his reality. How to treat a man like that…? A man whose every act felt a bit like being swatted away?

Raha cleared his throat and readied a _is something wrong?_ , but without changing his expression at all, Bas’ir offered the explanation unprompted.

“My mother is dying,” he said.


	4. Things You Learn Too Late - T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter Four**  
>  Bas'ir says goodbye to Raha to be with his dying mother. He learns something of the life she led.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come for the porn, stay for the pain. Or don't.

Bas Bahani passed away in her sleep the day before her only surviving son arrived in Gridania. She had lived longer than the attending conjurers had expected her to, and he had traveled a bit slower, spent too much time admiring the scenery and setting his jaw.

When Bas’ir first received the news, Raha placed himself on the other side of the bed and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Should you stay another night...I would be with you. If you would have me,” he said. His ears twitched back, and he held his hands out as extra assurance. “As a - as a friend.”

Bas’ir kept his eyes pointed upwards and let the numbness reach his neck before speaking. “I ought to leave as soon as possible. Inform the masters. Prepare my belongings.”

“I will help you.”

“Complete what work I might reasonably have time for.”

Raha frowned deeper. _Now is no time for work_ , he thought to say. But he’d not spent enough time around troubled souls to know whether speaking was appropriate so close to the winding of a wound. And _wounded_ his friend certainly looked, eyes wide with focus, pupils twitching from ilm to ilm of space above, only detectable to one as close as Raha was. To hold someone, to hear one cry - these were things the Seeker knew to do. But Bas’ir did not move. Did not cry.

Raha met with his own master and brought with him what work he’d managed to finish the evening prior. He told him he intended to spend a good part of the day offering what comfort he could to a dear friend. When he mentioned the Keeper by name, the master’s face eased in understanding. _Very well_ , he’d said. _I’m loathe to admit it, but your time is best allotted as companion first and scholar second._

Allag would wait.

Bas’ir kept a straight face throughout the day, up until the very end. He’d called for a carriage, averse as he was to aetheryte teleportation - Raha wasn’t certain the man was even capable - and the two of them stood without speaking outside the halls of academia. It was midafternoon by the time Bas’ir considered himself ready enough to be helped off. He insisted on dragging his own luggage with him. Raha followed with empty hands.

“Would you like to sit?” Raha said after a while, leaning forward in the breeze. Birds chirped not far away despite a pervasive chill.

“No.” The steely look remained. “It shan’t be long.”

“...very well.” His friend was beautiful, he thought. The scarf suited him, especially when the leaves turned orange. He wondered how long Bas’ir would be gone, whether he’d have interesting stories upon his return. Whether the leaves would turn orange. How long did his mother have? Bas’ir hadn’t said. Raha hadn’t asked. Perhaps he should have. Perhaps that was the role he should play in the Keeper’s destiny. Ask the questions he’d benefit from having answered, this man who suffered and suffered in silence, suffered until word-blood trickled from his lips and dried up between there and the line of his jaw.

Raha opened his mouth but couldn’t find the right words either. Instead, he pressed his forehead into Bas’ir’s shoulder and held his hand in both of his.

Bas’ir caught a cry in his throat, recoiled at first but - softened. Softened deeply. He leaned against his friend and held hard, so hard his fingernails left marks in the Seeker’s skin. “Raha…”

"You are allowed to cry, you fool."

"I will not," he said, whimpering, cupping his face in his other hand. "Would you cry for your mother? Despite it all?"

"I…" Long pause. Heavy, boiling. With the lull, his ears pricked forward at motion in the distance, wheels against stone. The carriage would wind around the corner soon enough. Prolonged absence warranted an honest answer, so he lifted his head and waited until Bas’ir was looking at him again. "Yes, I would. And I think someday...you will as well.”

“Well…” Basir wore perhaps the most honest expression he ever had - smiling through the tears. “Now I cry for you.”

“Bas’ir - “

“Let’s kiss and pretend we were in love.”

“Pretend we were - ?”

Bas’ir clasped Raha’s hands in his own and brought their lips together. This kiss, both longer and more chaste than any they had shared before, set Raha’s tail straight first, whipping next. It tasted like fruit that grew only in winter. When the sound of the carriage stopped, the Keeper pulled away and raised Raha’s hands next, kissed and kissed and kissed, walking backwards all the way. When he could kiss no more, Raha stumbled forward into Bas’ir’s lost grip. The Keeper was leaving, and spoke madly as he did:

“I’ll be back. I’ll be back. I promise you, I’ll be back. My strange and beautiful friend.”

_________________

They asked him if he wanted to view the body before she was prepared for internment. Bas Bahani, buried as a Gridanian. Bas Bahani dying, surrounded by Elezen caretakers, her name on the lips of the Padjal. Bas Bahani breathing her last breath yalms from the forest in which she once lived and in which she raised her one child who’d lived long enough to breathe.

He told them no, but caught a glimpse of her lying like a relic through a crack in the door. Even in death she sneered. _You’re late_ , he imagined her saying. _Should have followed closer._

Those caring for her - there were more than he expected, as though she were someone of import and not an old, idling Keeper - knew well of Bas’ir, though Bas had colored their knowledge. They knew he had left, that he had an unpleasant air about him, and that he’d always been a bit sickly. From the whisperings of other Miqo’te, the conjurers also learned of his father’s speculated identity. For surely, it couldn’t be as the mother Keeper said...surely blood like that couldn’t have produced a child under her circumstances...though were it the case, it could explain his fragility...and her history of stillbirths...

After Bas’ir had stood in the hallway clenching and unclenching his fists for half a bell, a timid and pale-faced Elezen man approached him with a crisp parchment. “Forgive me, sir.” he said. “Your mother’s accounts.”

Bas’ir’s eyes darted to him like he’d spied a snake in the grass. “My mother’s what, precisely?”

He winced and looked away. “Loathe am I to inform you, but your mother passed with a number of debts to her name. Most notably to a certain High House of Ishgard, of which I’m certain you are aware.”

He straightened his shoulders and did nothing to stop his eyes from flaring wide.

“She, er...we were under the impression you were already working on behalf of one Lord Florimand.”

“Lord _who_?”

“Of House…” He stepped back. “Of House Dzemael, sir. For the past two years, your mother was - ”

“Two? Two years?” He pressed his fingers into his forehead and shook. “Just hand me the damn papers. Here.”

“Sir.” He backed away, fiddled with now-empty hands, and retreated to a doorless room down the hallway.

Bas’ir examined the ink until his eyes crossed. Then he sat it on the floor, squatted, and traced the lines with his index finger. When people passed through, he paid them no mind. The only things worth acknowledging were those damning numbers on the page.

His mother had spent a fortune she didn’t have. Or rather, House Dzemael had spent a fortune on her care...in exchange for a promise she’d have _him_ fulfill.

There was nothing like the mercury coiling inside him. She had all but sold her son to some house she’d seduced? Blackmailed? Magicked? It all felt the same - like a cast of laughter from beyond the grave, from the very next room. Bas Bahani was gone, and there was much she’d left behind. Much to do, to deal with. Much to solve and naught with which to solve it.

She was smiling after all.

Bas’ir thought of his strange and beautiful friend and sat with his eyes to the ceiling until he realized he had no choice but to become somebody else.


	5. Things You Remember When You Suffer - E

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter Five**  
>  Bas'ir recalls an intimate moment with his dear friend. Something that proves to be quite formative as he forges the path of an adventurer.

The tub was porcelain white, well-maintained, and generically sized - which is to say a member of any given race could have used it just fine...which is to say it was plenty big enough to accommodate a Roegadyn man...which is to say a smaller man might find himself with plenty room leftover.

"I...I think we could fit," Raha said. He shifted his weight, eyes focused on the silver drain. Behind him, his tail flickered into another's tail and threatened to coil.

"Aye," Bas'ir said. He let it coil and coiled in return. A skeptic chill glinted in his gaze, but the corner of his lip curled up. "But should we?"

"It would save time."

"Would it?"

"It could." Raha smiled into his friend's shoulder. "But it won't."

"No. It won't."

Long ago, Bas’ir had had a roommate, then he’d had another, and another yet. But eventually he found himself easily alone with his steaming attitude, as one of the few students who could truthfully claim to have private quarters. And Raha was one of the others, though it was not his negativity that drove people away. It was his _dedication_ \- his late night scrawling, his ceaseless page-turning, his propensity for dialogue with his own self, regardless of the light in the sky.

“...let me help you,” Bas’ir said, gripping his towel with one hand and reaching for his companion’s buttons. The Keeper had been naked and keen on showering already, when Raha knocked against the door with his knee, holding not only a pile of books, but also a godsdamned _bow_ of all things. Everything he brought now sat on Bas’ir’s bed...perhaps a lack of foresight had placed it there.

“I’m fine,” Raha said, working at his vest. “You can go on.”

“Ah.” Bas’ir rolled his eyes. “Big archer man can take off his own clothes now, hmm?”

“Oh, please proceed before I push you.”

With a stretch, he reached the faucet and twisted it to a spot that felt right. Squeaks and hisses filtered into the room as water rushed in the pipes. “It’s not even full yet.”

“Yes, so it would hurt if I follow through.”

“Hmm.” The water stung his hand at first...but he got used to it. So would the rest of his body. He slipped his towel off, lowering his head almost in shame, and stepped into the tub.

__________

After each Miqo’te had taken a few moments to adjust to the temperature, wet his hair, find a somewhat comfortable position, they regarded one another, timidly and through steam. Raha sat on the side farthest from the faucet, and though he could have slid his back against the slope, he sat up straight with the water just at his nipples. Where he was cross-legged, Bas’ir let his legs straighten so he had a foot on either side of Raha. The Keeper slumped to the side of the faucet with his head cocked. Like a lurking eft, he was up to his chin in the water.

Raha laughed with his hand over his mouth. “Are you comfortable?”

Bas’ir responded by blowing bubbles.

“I see.” He relaxed a little and regarded the bottles and soaps placed on various ledges and hangers. Bas’ir had far more than most men, Raha thought, and he couldn’t imagine what all of them were for. “I don’t think I’ve seen your hair slicked back before.”

The creature rose from the water and exhaled. “No? Nor I yours, I suppose.”

“Nay, you most certainly have. That time you - “

“Ah, yes. Don’t remind me. I was embarrassed enough as it happened.”

“Yes, _embarrassed_ is the word I had in mind.”

“I _will_ splash you and don’t think I won’t.” He hooked his ankles behind Raha and bent his knees to bring himself closer. Their faces were about half a fulm apart, both smirking.

“We’re in a bath together, so I’m afraid your water-based threat is meaningless. However…” Raha leaned his forehead into Bas’ir’s. “I only meant to compliment you.”

He tried his best not to flinch, managed to keep himself from blinking. “Please do.”

“You look very handsome.”

"As do you."

"With your hair back, I mean. Would you consider wearing it like that elsewhere?" Raha thumbed at Bas'ir's cheek and fixed a strand of hair stuck beneath his eye in line with his facial markings.

"Only for you. After all, I suspect you feel much the same about your braid." He leaned back on his palms and tried to look his friend in the eye. Thankfully, the soapy water left something to the imagination. They’d entered knowing full well how productive they’d be, but something about being completely bare in such a personal setting toned Bas’ir’s bark down to the size of his bite. “So, what’s with the bow?”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a damned bow on my bed and I’d like to know why, you silly man.”

Raha hunkered closer to the water and wore a wicked grin. “Silly Bas’ir. You speak not to a _mere scholar_ but to a _proud acolyte_ of the arrow.”

“Hm. I’m shaking.”

“You ought to be more careful.” The water rippled as the Seeker crept forward like a coeurl and played at Bas’ir’s inner thigh. “My hobby requires accuracy and precision that I’m not sure you can handle.”

For once the Keeper didn’t have to worry about blushing. In such a steamy environment, the redness of his face was trivial, dismissible. Still, how verily could he maintain a facade when that hand danced so close to where he wanted it to be? Where he knew it would end up? He rubbed his chin on his shoulder, closed his eyes, and hummed. “Indulge me with your particular skills, then.”

Bas’ir ran several potential retorts through his head - _What makes you think you deserve them?_ or something along those lines, he figured was most likely - but instead Raha was silent. The water rose and fell with forward motion, and soon a second hand met Bas’ir’s body, this one at his waist. He inhaled sharply and curled his tail around his leg.

“Shh. Do you want to be indulged or not?” Raha curved his index beneath, to the Keeper’s entrance.

Bas’ir straightened his back like he’d been shocked into place. The water, the warmth - things were _different_ and powerful.

“Relax. Lean back.”

He obliged as best he could, moving towards the faucet once more, craning his neck to avoid it. Raha moved with him and circled that spot until the motion of Bas’ir’s chest animated the pool. Though the Seeker’s own arousal begged for attention, he slipped a hand to his friend’s instead and stroked once, in time with added pressure.

Bas’ir thought he’d melt at first penetration. How his body kept form despite the element, he had no idea. The first word-thoughts he had were “I don’t deserve to go to paradise;” it didn’t stop him from sinking deeper into the water, into each push like a fucking puppet. He’d have done anything, made ugly promises, forgotten his creed of insolence.

Raha tightened his grip. The rhythm was slow but steady, enough to be just _too much_ , not enough to make him cry about it.

Bas’ir’s eyes drifted open. There Raha was, focused on his work, obscured by steam and pleasure-blur. Beautiful. A beautiful man, a beautiful person. The Keeper tongued at his fang. _Is this what falling in love feels like?_

The thought choked him. He made out like he was clearing his throat to speak. “W...what shall I do for you?” he asked. “Once you’ve...finished seeing to me?”

“Oh?”

“When I take care of you...shall I dunk my head under the water, like I’m bobbing for apples?”

“Pah!” The wicked smile reemerged. “My plans do not involve you finishing in this tub.”

“Seven hells, it’s _my_ tub.”

“And you gave _me_ trouble over my hobby.” He pulled his hands away and cocked his head. “So I have half a mind to string you up like a bow.”

Bas’ir scoffed. “Yes, with all your ‘accuracy’ and ‘precision,’ I presume?”

“Precisely.”

“Very well.” He sighed, shaking out the dream still half-alive in his fingertips and tail. “You realize if we take this outside...we’ll return to this very spot afterwards?”

“In all likelihood.” He rose and kissed Bas’ir’s forehead. “Perhaps you’ll have opportunity to give me a treatment of your own imagining.”

"Hmm." A pair of towels waited just in reach. "Waste of godsdamned water."

__________

Bas’ir vomited when he attuned to the aetheryte in Gridania. He pushed away the Adder who clambered to his side offering assistance. When he was tasked with gathering pelts and eggs and unsavory items, he scrounged up what gil he had and bought a larger set of gloves that he could wear over his fine ones, so as not to sully them. Of course, as soon as he encountered the creatures he was meant to slay, he found himself weak in the knees before he’d ever loosed his arrow.

His arrow, yes, because it was the only art he was even close to having encountered. His arrow because he had touched the arms of an archer, the real, ripe flesh of an archer and felt something warm enough to draw him close. And he was no good at it. He had no sense of combat, no drive to fight or kill or maim - but he knew he’d have been an even worse conjurer.

He cried every day he killed something. He cried every day he failed to kill something. But at least Mother Miounne - or Miounne, rather, as he never took to calling her “mother” - had seen to it that he could cry in the comfort of a discounted room at the Carline Canopy.

And yes, all the fruits of his labor, all the tears that flew on the wind of his weapon, all the blood his calloused fingers shed - anything positive produced by his suffering went to pay off a debt with which he had naught to do. Though he would have made a better fugitive than archer, he often he ran a fantasy through his head when he couldn’t sleep.

_You there. Archer._

Raha’s ears would twitch back before he could turn to see who’d accosted him.

_Fancy you’re a better shot than I?_

The Seeker would smile, would rush forward to behold his old companion’s new strength and glory, perhaps even touch his hands or exclaim. How long had it been?

_That’s no proper answer, my strange and beautiful friend. Are you up for a match, or no?_

And Raha would be up for the match. And Bas’ir would let him win. Would seal reunion with a kiss.

He began dreaming in blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm alive but I'm barely breathin'


	6. Things You Grind Your Teeth To - E

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter Six - E**  
>  Bas'ir needs some healing. So does Raha.

The funny man leaned against the fence with a nasty look on his face. Tomlo had never seen him before, nor his scruffy scarf, nor his bruised-up eye, nor his lopsided ears. And Tomlo knew for sure because he'd seen every funny, silly man in Gridania and stuck his tongue out at him at one point or another.

When he stuck his tongue out at _this_ man, the man did nothing but knock his tail against the post, didn't even turn his gaze. It stopped Tomlo in his tracks. Mama tugged hard at his hand, and he dug his heels into the ground.

“Come,” she said.

“Mama, what’s wrong with that man?” His curiosity - and his voice - rang loud. One of the man’s ears twitched in response, but he kept his gaze away, his arms crossed.

“Looks to be an adventurer, child,” she said. Then, squinting: “And a green one at that." The hem of his coat was white with frayed fringe, yet it had the design, the suggestion of something nobler...like he'd stolen it from someone more important. "Now come.”

“What’s wrong with his ears?”

At that, he twisted his lips and finally locked eyes with the child. “Silence, brat. You ought to learn you only get wounds like these by being very dangerous.”

Mama scowled and scooped Tomlo off the ground. “Aye, or by pissin’ off the wrong mothers.”

"Teach your child some manners, won't you?"

"You've got half as much as he, and many more years. Y’ought shame your own mother, if any.” Arms tight around Tomlo, she quickened her pace. With his chin _just_ poking over her shoulder, he could see the funny man’s reddish face. Had it not been snow-pale before? No matter. The change in appearance warranted another silly face, another sticking-out of the tongue.

This time it was like the man didn’t see Tomlo at all.

__________

Finally, Bas’ir’s healer of choice emerged from the guild and gave him a tired sigh from afar. Friendly, by her standards. She may as well have been beckoning with tea and tarts on a platter. He picked his bow from the ground and plodded over with his arms crossed as best he could without letting the wood drag through the grass.

“More work for the Man in Black, is it?” she said once he was closer. Sweat stuck loose strands of moon-pale hair to her forehead. A messy bun drooped on her neck. A Midlander, she looked too old for her age, but those who had suffered often did. She’d seen the worst of the Calamity.

“His character doesn’t warrant a name as striking as that,” Bas’ir said, walking past her and into the guild. “The Bastard in Black, try.”

“Well, that makes you the Bastard in Blue.”

Truthfully, he’d have waited bells longer to wind up in Amalia’s care. He respected a healer who wore scars on her face. He felt like it meant something, something honest. With his ear dangling in time with his steps, he led her to her own station and sat where he’d sat time and time before.

She set her hands on her hips. “And what manner of beast roughed you up this time?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” It’s what he felt like he should say. It’s what he felt like _he’d_ say. But his sneer faded too fast for him to do anything but sigh in concession. “Imps.”

“I’ve known archers to dispatch those foul things with a single shot.” The right ear was more or less fine. The left - not so much. Blood matted bits of fur with dark hair. Torn as it was, she figured he couldn’t feel much, and thus felt comfortable examining the wound with bone-dry fingers before beginning.

He fiddled with the tips of his gloves.They’d seen better days. A cut or two more and they’d be nothing but scraps. “Well, as you know...I’ve not been an archer for very long.”

“Sure.” She let go of his ears, and the wounded one flopped to the side of his head. “But you can't say that forever. Are you ready, then?”

“Get on with it.”

“Hmm?”

“Please.”

He clenched his eyes shut, held his fists tight. He _hated_ the sensation. It forced him to feel the blow again but backwards. Healing never tickled or soothed; it burned. It bled. Even for wounds as local as his - though, indeed, a man’s ears were certainly among his most sensitive parts - the pain was great. And it only made him feel weaker for having had to endure it.

_I am not cut out for this_ , he thought for the umpteenth time.

“Relax,” came the mage’s voice. “It’ll be easier for both of us if you just unwind a bit.”

He said nothing but eased his brow. Yellow brimmed through his eyelids.

“Hum a tune. Count to ten, why don’t you.”

“That’s...ridiculous.” He shook his head - a mistake. Like stepping through pins and needles, sensation surged in him anew.

“Hold still. It’ll be over soon.”

It _was_ over soon. But not soon enough. He had time aplenty to do some conjuring of his own; he drew up memories of songs sung and songs hummed between bookshelves, tunes borrowed from a friend and never properly returned. _Where is Raha?_ he often wondered or cried. But this question he asked only to avoid the answer. He knew exactly where Raha was. Shame is what burned a hole in his ear - the shame of not having been fast enough, strong enough, quick enough. But so was shame the reason he saw that beautiful man only in dreams, daydreams, and in the corner of his eye, when he felt particularly unfamiliar with the path upon which he had no choice but to tread.

These past six moons had been the fastest and most painful of his life.

“You’re done.” Amalia clapped his shoulders. “You all right?”

Testing his ear’s range of motion, he leaned forward and grunted in affirmation.

“A word of advice for you, if you’ll have it.”

“What.”

Letting go of his shoulders, she brushed her hair back into place and regarded her handiwork. “You’re going to have to work on your tolerance for pain. Or your aim, either.”

____________

How unbothered Raha had been for the past six moons. How unbothered and productive and absolutely, dreadfully, painfully bored.

It felt as though time no longer rushed haphazardly like wind through an open window. It crept down his back and pooled in uncomfortable places. He became irritated. Short. And frustrated that he never quite asked the right questions. Asking the right questions always relieved him even if he didn’t quite get the right answer in return.

Though he joined two others in bed, he never took a _lover_ , really. Something about the process felt stale and unfulfilling. Sometimes he returned to his own quarters and tried to sleep off the lingering longing. _Am I growing older?_ he often wondered. But -

_No_ , he would eventually think. _When I was truly happy, I was with Bas’ir._

To think it made his tail twitch in frustration. Six moons and no letters, no visits - worst of all, no explanation. Leave Raha alone with a tome and a task, he’d have your problem solved in a matter of moments. But Bas’ir was no Allagan relic, no prince. He was out of reach, a puzzle box begetting closure, a dream begetting remembrance. An arm’s length and a half away.

He could almost taste him on his pillow if he bit hard enough. And bite he did, with his hips reared up from the mattress, left hand testing his endurance one stroke at a time. It started accidentally enough, this new habit - a certain sunlight shade reminded him of a certain afternoon when a certain rascal took him by the window. “Hold on,” Bas’ir had said, setting Raha’s hands against the sill then spreading the curtains.

Raha, trousers pinned at his knees, bare ass pressed into his friend, had laughed and looked down. “You are _far_ too shy to have me against the glass.”

Bas’ir hinted forward, like he wanted to remind Raha just how hard he was...and then let go of the curtains. “You are right. Let’s hide.”

Sometimes just staring outside was enough to call the next part to mind. In the middle of a stack of papers, Raha would look through the window over his shoulder and remember how Bas’ir had flipped him around, dug his fangs into his neck and rubbed their members together, equal parts bold and embarrassed, blushing. It had taken the Keeper many nights with Raha to learn how to half-convincingly take the lead...and even when he wasn’t quite convincing, Raha encouraged him anyway. Especially when it felt that good, that warm, that _real_.

Raha raised his head from the pillow to catch his breath. Sweat coated his forehead, wetted the base of his tail. He’d been drawing it out for what felt like half a bell. Every time he came close to finishing, he rolled onto his side and remembered another detail, another grin or thrust that made his fingers tingle. He’d run it through his head until he felt each pulse was a personal affront against his pride...then he’d take himself in hand again.

By the window that day, Bas’ir had entered him with gusto but stopped once Raha took him in completely.

“It’s fine,” Raha said, gasping with a hand on his friend’s cheek. “K-keep going.”

Bas’ir lowered his head. “N...no…”

“What’s wrong? Is aught amiss?” Heavy breaths aside, the lack of motion was maddening. “I _want_ you. _Please_.”

“It’s just…” Bas’ir looked up with upturned eyebrows and a burgeoning smile. “I can’t...I can’t do this when you make such ridiculous faces.”

Remembering it, even so close to release, Raha laughed and smushed his face into the pillow again. Thank the _gods_ he had no roommate. As lonely as he’d been, he couldn’t help but groan in those final moments, whine with his chin pressed into a pool of spit. He moved his right hand from his balls to his tip and came into his palm, straightening his legs, his tail, pulling the blanket taut beneath him.

Only then did his muscles ache. His puzzled heart soon followed.


	7. Things You Call One Another - E

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter Seven - E**  
>  After just one night together, G'raha Tia has an intimate request for Bas'ir. Much later, Bas'ir finds himself locked in combat, freed, then locked in combat once again.

G’raha Tia was such a nice person. Someone who smiled at strangers. That’s why Bas’ir was so confused - how did this friendly Seeker’s cock end up in his smart mouth?

“Ah...you are...very good at this.” G’raha had his palm flat against his forehead, his eyes closed. This vulnerable look wasn’t one he wore in class or in the library...or at the gathering where they’d spent the night flirting through their teeth. Bas’ir eyed him from the place between his legs and tried to decide how beautiful he was, how much of a fool he wanted to act before him. _Very beautiful...and not so foolish...not yet_. Again, he took in as much as he could, wearing the peaceful eyes of a holy statue, and pressed his tongue down.

G’raha half coughed, half cleared his throat. “I..my...I must admit I thought perhaps - “

A peck on his tip. “You thought what?”

“I thought your fangs might pose a problem.”

“They can if you want them to.”

“I’ve never...with a Keeper before.”

“Well, do you want to keep going?”

It happened that G’raha didn’t speak, but set his hands on his new partner’s head to urge him down again. When Bas’ir groaned around him, he sighed like he’d been underwater. “S-sorry. I’m not far off now…”

But the Keeper planted his hands on the bed and brought himself up, squinting. “Listen here,” he said, nipping G’raha’s chin between his thumb and index. “I’m not the type who likes to be pushed around in intimate situations. It won’t be good for you if you try something like that again.”

G’raha looked at the Keeper; his brow was low, his gaze unflinching, his lips taut and downturned. Whether there was _bite_ to it, G’raha doubted...thus the wall to his right became suddenly very interesting. “Forgive me,” he said, laugh successfully stifled.

“Should I?” Bas’ir returned to his knees and coiled his fingers around the heat, let his thumb tease beneath his base. “After all the times you made me look so ignorant.”

“Huh?”

“You’ve always been a more impressive scholar, and I’ve hated you for it.” The tone he chose, both teasing and true. It made his eyes heavy, but it could've passed for lust.

“I’ve never - ah - oh…” The man’s lips were upon him once again. G'raha pressed his fingernails into his palms and leaned forward. He’d wanted to come for some time now. How embarrassing that an abundance of words colored even his acts of pleasure. Despite the rhythm, the wetness on his dick, he wondered now how often the Keeper had thought of him, and whether those thoughts were fond? What he needed was to ask more questions. What he needed was a fireside chat over tea or coffee or scholarly theory. What he needed was…

_Oh gods_ what he _needed_ was a little bit more leverage. Whipping his tail to the side, he fell back on the bed and pressed his heels into the floor to meet the Keeper halfway. This was good. This was _very_ good. But it was even better when he strained against his body’s demand to surrender and managed to raise his head from the mattress. Bas’ir had his eyes open, just barely, and looked simply pornographic at the end of the bed. Between the image and the sounds - so wet, so lewd, so sharp and heavy in G’raha’s ears - the Seeker had no chance.

“Ha - here.”

G’raha clenched the blankets hard and came with his hips ilms off the bed. He thought of stars blanketing the night sky and naught else but pleasure. Eventually, the blood flowed back to its proper places, his heartbeat faded back into obscurity. When Bas’ir swallowed around him, he jerked a bit and clenched his forehead.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” the Keeper asked, wiping his lips and crawling onto the bed to straddle G’raha.

“You are very generous to please me so.” He smiled and helped the other work off his scarf. “I see you are keen on asking for aught in return.”

“It’s only natural.”

“And how shall you seek release?”

"Well, I'm going to fuck you, of course."

The Seeker purred, amused and curious. "Are you now?"

Sensing the doubt on the other man's lips, Bas'ir reddened like a rolanberry and raised his chin. "Yes!"

G’raha leaned back and finished unbuttoning his shirt; he hadn’t quite managed to get it all the way off before lust landed him on the bed. Once his chest was bare, he spread his arms wide against the cool mattress. “Well, I’m not going to stop you.”

That chest cut a figure far more entrancing than a scholar’s had any right to be. Bas’ir eyed it with renewed insecurity. Tail whipping behind him, he reached out - and drew his hand back.

“What?” G’raha asked with wild eyes. “Are you prepared or not?”

Bas’ir’s eyes were wilder. “Yes! Yes! Just...a moment.”

“Sure.”

The Keeper removed himself from G’raha and the mattress and skittered down the hallway. The Seeker closed his eyes, clasped his hands over his navel, and smiled.

As for Bas’ir...he hadn’t really expected to get that far.

Back to the bathroom door, he breathed through his impulse to hyperventilate, counted to fourteen or so, touched his chest to make sure he hadn’t astrally projected into someone else’s body. And then he looked in the mirror.

The skin of his face shone as white as the porcelain tub at his side - less than ideal, but certainly something easily missed in the limited light of the bedroom - and his yellow eyes glowed like fire. He let them glow until he half convinced himself...re-convinced himself he was ready to face the eccentric in his bed.

He scurried out the door then immediately returned to grab something from the cabinet.

G’raha was breathing easy when Bas’ir finally returned. The Keeper had a bottle in his hand and wore the face of a man who was trying to determine whether he was being scammed. No, a man who was close to deciding he was being scammed. “Ah, there you are,” G’raha sang. “Shall we?”

Bas’ir didn’t waste a second spitting it out. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know why I just told you that.”

“Well, you weren’t exactly keeping it secret.”

Silence from the blushing, white-knuckled man.

G’raha sat up and smiled. “Here. Come here.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’d not dare! Let’s sit awhile.” He patted the bed twice. The Keeper’s ears twitched in time. Though he pouted about it, he made his way over eventually, and they both leaned back with their legs bent over the edge of the mattress. G’raha pushed his nose into Bas’ir’s shoulder and inhaled, slipping the tips of his fingers about half an ilm under his shirt. “You smell nice.”

_If only he’d pressed beneath my trousers instead_ , Bas’ir thought. _Then, perhaps, I’d have an out._ He also thought very deeply on how nice the other man smelled, how in-sync his energy, his air was with the other things that had attracted and aroused him. If he got drunk enough on lust, he hoped he’d prove himself capable of taking the lead. Looking to the undone button of his partner’s trousers, he saw the Seeker was hard again. Bas’ir blinked.

“Oh, you have noticed?” G’raha trailed his hand farther up the Keeper’s chest.

“Your appetite is...to be admired.”

“Well, I must admit. Something about being with other Miqo’te...even other men…”

“It’s a biological thing, is it not? Even one called Tia, like yourself, can feel that burning need of one called Nunh.”

“I certainly feel _something_. Do you not?” He rolled his head around, stretched his free arm. “Perhaps more experimentation is needed.”

“Experimentation.”

“Yes, to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

“...I’m not fond of your verbiage there.”

The Seeker burst out laughing. “Forgive me. I want you to be comfortable.”

Bas’ir huffed and considered once more how foolish to act in front of the man he’d already decided was beautiful. But he had no words.

“Here.” G’raha sat up and worked his trousers all the way down. “Get undressed.”

He frowned but slipped his hands to the hem of his shirt, pulled it off his head after giving his blush time to fade away. “E-eager…”

“Aren’t you?”

“Yes…” He faced the Seeker, now posing with his head resting in his hands, gloriously naked. 

That red tail swished like a metronome, and _gods_ was time ticking. “So how shall you have me?”

He wanted to have him. But how could he have him without having his lips first? He wanted to be like a storm but removed the rest of his clothes like a lamb, moved upon the Seeker like a fox at best. G'raha groaned into the kiss and the sound was so sweet Bas’ir made believe it was genuine. With hands pressed into the Seeker's shoulders, he leveraged him onto his back and made a mess of his neck with fang-kissed nips. Each taste urged him ever forward, reservations not everlong behind.

Mouth latched at G’raha’s throat, he slid his palm across the mattress until he found that needful bottle, popped it open with his thumb - fumbled it - finally let go of the other man’s neck. This time his shaking hand found the wet of the tiny spill first, bottle second. Worse things could happen to a mattress. Fingers unsteady. G’raha panting. Bas’ir couldn’t look, couldn't afford to. Just listening was enough to drive him, heat him. So godsdamn hot, it was all of a sudden.

“Come back,” the Seeker called.

Bas’ir grunted, kept his eyes low as he applied the oil to his fingers and returned. This was a bit like solving a puzzle. Left thumb to lower lip - right index to entrance - press the pieces in, just so.

G’raha sighed in time with the pressure. Bas’ir wondered why it felt like he was having sex in a dream, like some ghost was stroking him with a firm and steady grip. The sight of G’raha Tia, a man he’d envied, pestered, prodded - now pleasured - it felt voyeuristic - it felt tangible to watch him writhe.

“More,” the Seeker said, heavy-lidded.

Bas’ir hunkered closer to his chest, moved his left hand from his mouth to his nipple, slipped another finger inside. He felt like a devil and a student all at once, teaching one thing, learning something else. Wanting, more than anything.

G’raha wrapped his leg around and tensed. Soon his arms joined the uneven embrace. Nails dug into pale skin and left tiny red crescents.

Bas’ir liked how the Seeker clung to him like some needed, necessary thing. He liked the way he shifted into his hand and reacted to changes, to the circles he thumbed at his chest. And he liked the circle G’raha’s mouth made when he added one more finger.

“Oh _Seven Hells_ Bas’ir.”

The Keeper, with the glowing eyes of an enemy, moaned back at his partner and let his head fall forward. The wrong response could have knocked him out, he figured. A little voice in his head told him to pace himself, give less than what he thought himself capable of taking.

But just moments later G’raha had other ideas.

“You want me,” he said on the heels of a breathy laugh. “Take me.”

“You’re sure.” He was already reaching for the bottle again, fangs nigh chattering in anticipation. A web of doubt tricked his mind into asking too many questions, forgoing too many motor skills - _how do I, do I, do I_ -

“ _Do it_.”

Bas’ir swallowed hard. His left hand slicked then slipped then plodded onto the mattress. Chasing the new balance, the right helped him set his tip at that wanting spot. Only after two full breaths did he dare add pressure and _gods_ did it electrify him to see how easy it was to enter.

G’raha squeezed Bas’ir’s torso with his knees and dug his teeth into his lip, closed his eyes in bliss.

Momentum sent the Keeper lurching forward. His mouth landed near G’raha’s collarbone, but the only imperative he could follow other than _fuck_ had him tracking down to the Seeker’s nipple so he could catch it between his teeth. Oh, and once he’d done it - his hips needed something deeper, would stop at nothing to get it. He laughed the tip of his tongue from his mouth, thinking - this scholar, this well-studied student eagerly taking him in, squeezing around him, whining as he pushed himself farther, pinched his nipples. _Gods yes,_ Bas'ir thought, pulse racing, _I'm going to fuck him so hard he forgets last semester, I'm going to_ -

He came.

"Gah - G’raha!"

He came and it _felt good_. But there was nothing, _absolutely nothing_ , he could do to take it back. The second his lust left him and he stopped ramming the Seeker like an animal, a chill ran down his spine, straight through the tip of his tail. He couldn’t even swallow. He couldn’t even breathe.

But a begging look called from beneath the Keeper “N-no...please.” G’raha locked his ankles behind Bas’ir’s back and tugged. “Help me finish. I want more."

The Keeper blinked.

“Please, gods, _touch me. Kiss me_.”

Like his life depended on it, he surged forward and kissed G’raha, mouth open, messy, desperate. A hand guided his hand to the Seeker’s want, so he stroked and bit and tried his best to use his body to apologize.

G’raha wrenched his head back and gasped. “There.” A new tension sent a jolt through Bas’ir’s over-sensitive heat, and the Seeker’s second orgasm colored both of their chests and bits of the mattress, while staccato notes of pleasure spilled from his mouth until finally his limbs went limp.

Bas’ir brought his forehead to G’raha’s chest and was surprised to feel his fingers dancing in his hair a moment later, teasing at his ears.

“My friend,” the Seeker said.

“I want to die.”

“What?! Please don’t.” He held him tighter. “You make me feel _very_ enticing.”

Bas’ir groaned. “I had hoped to...leave a better impression.”

“I assure you the one you’ve left with me is far better than the one I left you. As a scholar.”

He raised his head. “Huh?”

“I apologize if I ever...if my work or comments ever rubbed you the wrong way.”

Forehead back to chest. “Must you phrase it like that?”

G’raha blinked and cackled once again, having noticed his mistake. “Let’s clean up, shall we?”

That same night, on a different set of linens, they lay together once more wearing naught but smallclothes, skin soft from a recent wash. Bas’ir was chewing on his lip with eyes up and his arms crossed. G’raha spoke first. “If we’re going to do this again…”

“We will.”

“Then you ought to call me Raha, as is proper for a lover.”

He raised his eyebrow. “Lover. That word’s a bit formal, don’t you think?”

“ _Guh-ra-ha_ is a bit formal when you’ve got me gripped by my nipples. I assure you.”

Bas'ir blushed with his eyes toward the ceiling. Soon, he couldn't bear even that and shook himself face-first into the pillow. He mumbled something G'raha-Raha couldn't hear.

The Seeker tapped at his back with a smile. "What's that?" 

He raised himself up just enough. "I said I wouldn't characterize my behavior as being...centered around your - "

"No matter." Raha's turn to cross his arms behind his head and stare starry-eyed at the ceiling. "You'll say it next time."

"We'll see."

"I have ways of making you say it."

"Pray, remember where hubris gets you…" Bas'ir curled his legs up and pressed his back into the Seeker's side. Across bare skin they traded warmth. "I'll not soon forget."

"Names are important," Raha said. "What one calls you says something about the way one sees you." He freed his right arm and draped it over the Keeper's side to feel the gentle waves of his breaths. "What one asks to be called says something about the way they'd like to be seen…"

Wide-eyed and serious, Bas’ir swept his tongue over his fangs. _Lover_. He’d slept with none who called him that before. Alert as he was, the weight of it in his throat made him want to sit still and breathe for the man who thought to know him better.

“Very well.”  
___________

“Damned Guardian Tree, damned Ixal, damned Bowlord Lewin.”

Bas’ir spat out the words between arrows.

“Damned masked stranger, damned Shroud, damned - “

“Watch it!” A fellow archer ducked, having sensed the slip of a shaft above his head, maybe an ilm, maybe less. Plenty of room.

Bas’ir let the next arrow fly, nostrils flared. It hit what he’d been aiming for - the space next to his first, in the bloody back of some Ixali grunt. “...damned common soldiery.”

When accompanied by other friendly combatants, Bas’ir’s attitude outgrew his disdain for battle. Archery felt more like asking the right question in class or producing an elegant rebuttal. Less like begging for a higher mark.

“They’ve got reinforcements!”

The archers surged forward as a group, but Bas’ir slinked behind and took his time nocking his next, curling his lips around mantras only his muscles remembered. Click and click and swish...pause...on to the next. A rhythm to which any archer could sicken himself, and not one Bas'ir chose at that moment, not when he was _almost certain_ something else was afoot. He squinted and scanned the treeline for whatever was giving him the _strangest_ feeling, one he'd felt a handful of times since he returned to the Shroud.

A hard bump on his back - another friendly. “Forward, adventurer! You’ll hit nothing from here.”

“Watch me.”

“ _Go._ ”

And so he had to go. Each breath read like a hiss through his teeth, and by the time the enemies grew sparse he tasted blood in the back of his throat. How his lungs burned even after moons of work, trial after trial of _adventuring_ \- of slaving as a debtor of the Dzemael - how limited his thighs, his locking fingertips, even his sweat-drenched eyebrows were at readying him for further survival.

And yet he survived.

“You there.”

Bas’ir crouched holding his side, not injured but exhausted. The tail of his coat hung into the water pooled around the Guardian Tree. Sweat had dripped into his left eye, so he looked up with his right and saw a Gods’ Quiver Bow approaching. “What?” he spat back.

“The Bowlord bids you hold this position,” he said with quirked lips. “Enemies may yet lurk near, so stay on your guard.”

“And where are you lot off to?”

“The left flank. The battle yet rages.” The man trotted off like he’d won a lottery.

Bas’ir scoffed and wiped his sleeve over his eyes. It didn’t help. “Well, I suppose I’ll stay right here then!”

Silence. He was alone before the Guardian Tree, and he felt like his bones were bleeding.

Could there come a day when the woods once again meant something empowering for him? Perhaps. The water, even as it soaked through his boots, cooled and calmed him. When the wind carried anything other than Ixali war cries, it sounded almost like a song. It had blown his scarf off before, and perhaps more critically, had blown his arrows far from their course...but at the Shroud’s most sincere moments, one would never need let fly an arrow. Not really.

His mother never instilled in him that spiritual appreciation of nature. A tree was a tree was a tree. A meal a meal. Elementals be damned. Was never his job to appease them. Just his place to survive. But maybe, kneeling as he was, breathing with burn in his lungs, he thought he could come to know nature like one of his heritage should.

His ears flicked back and caught a sound coming from the base of the Tree. Footsteps.

A masked man. _The_ masked man, in all likelihood.

The water at Bas’ir’s feet may as well have been stone, so manifest had his exhaustion become. “What do _you_ want?” he said, shaking his head like one scolding a child.

The masked man had expected less attitude and more prowess from the archer who’d meddled with him so. The Miqo’te was little more than a heap of flesh and bone, squatting as he was before the Tree. Whether his aim rang true mattered not when a hefty wind could topple him over.

_But I must remember_ , the stranger thought as he raised his hands in summoning. _Her blessing has carried him thus far._

By the time his magic darkened the sky, Bas’ir had only begun to stand, and only because his ankles ached from balancing him so low to the ground.

The masked man smiled. This creature was weak and lucky, luckier than he knew. “You may have bested the golem, but you will not fare so well this day.”

Hissing air whipped the Keeper’s ears in circles. Whatever this was it was no Ixali secret, no trick of the light. For the first time, Bas’ir felt the danger _meant_ something. This was no simple quest, no archer-for-hire mishap.

He could die.

Swallowing hard, the part of his brain still reading the world as a scholar flipped for the right page. That growled incantation, the staleness of the wind, the monstrous form apparating just fulms before him - there must be _something_. He cursed himself for spending the last part of his life away from his studies. But even if he knew the right answers, they’d not have carried his hand to his quiver, nor his arrow to his bow.

Pain broke in his head, ice blue pain, echoes of agony unknown, followed by a liquid impulse to live, to fight, to see the next day. A woman’s voice, and not one he knew. Words he felt but couldn’t translate.

He laughed through the pain and thought back. _If I’m starting to hear voices, I ought to hear Raha’s. Not yours._

No reply.

The arrow was nocked, by him or supernatural forces, he couldn’t be sure. With the wind, he surged sideways to evade a claw-latched blade and loosed the shaft.

The beast - no manner of beast he’d seen before - reared back and swung once more, this time with a second blade.

Bas’ir skirted it, leapt back. He needed more distance, more room to hold his arms steady. Another arrow readied, shot taken - 

The creature hardly flinched. It surged forward like a wave and forced him farther back. The masked man watched from behind and readied his magic anew.

More distance, more burn, more water creeping into Bas’ir’s boots, sweat drawing down his back. At his next arrow, he noted the creature’s pointed tail.

_Is this…? Some manner of gargoyle?_

“You look like you could do with a hand!”

A new magic sprang over Bas’ir’s shoulder, into the beast’s. He turned and saw two newcomers racing into the fray. Those strange _Sharlayans_ , in _Gridania_ of all places - a bittersweet relief. He needed to end this quickly, lest he be mistaken for the person he ought to have been.

The gargoyle dropped not soon after, fading back into whatever oblivion whence the masked man had dragged it. With the fighter and the Lalafell keeping the stranger busy, Bas’ir finally got far enough away to lodge a few sound shots in the truer enemy. By the time a new wind surged into him, the Archons (if he had the right of it) had the fellow on the ropes...and thus Bas’ir felt he might easily slip away, perhaps chancing a shot here and there so he’d not immediately be missed…<

On his way out, he encountered an entire body of quivermen, along with Bowlord Lewin who wanted, of course, a word, to say the least. Bas’ir, not keen on being dragged back to Gridania by his bad ear, acquiesced. With bloody knuckles, wet boots, and a heavy tail, he plodded through the Shroud wondering what light had carried his arrows that day...and why those Sharlayans seemed to appear around every other corner.

______________

_Wearing heeled boots was a mistake_ , he told himself like he did every day. The pain ran from his ankles up his calves, and still he was made to stand at attention before his superiors after all the trouble he’d seen and felt. That force, that waking dream yet lingered in the space between his eyes and the high point of his skull. It weighed him down on one side, like the drink did a drunk. A bed would be nice. Time to use it, better.

Just when he thought he might chance a complaint in the presence of his vaunted master, the doors opened behind him, and all who faced the entrance gasped.

Bas’ir had seen Kan-E-Senna before but never from so close a distance. Aside her Elezen complement, she resembled a child even with her glamour. As every other party saluted or bowed, he stepped back, pinned his ears.

“I am come to express my gratitude for your valiant efforts before the Guardian Tree,” she said to the Bowlord.

Lewin bowed his head. “Milady.”

The Elder Seedseer turned next her gaze upon Bas’ir. “I am informed that an adventurer of singular talent now walks amongst us.”

He straightened his back and turned over his shoulder, trying to pretend he wasn’t in the way.

She persisted. “You are he, are you not?”

Yellow eyes narrowed. Tail twitched for clarification. The Elder Seedseer recognizing the efforts of a debtor? A squeamish, mean-spirited, and unstable archer without a backbone? A lowly Miqo'te? _Amalia said something to one of the Padjal_ , he thought. _Though she certainly owed me no favors._

Kan-E-Senna smiled, apparently taking his open mouth as affirmation. “Well met and well come to our fair nation. What do they call you?”

_She doesn’t know_ , he realized. It nearly burnt him. _She doesn’t know this is my original home, the land of my ancestors, for better or worse._

“Your name, adventurer?”

He blinked at her like an animal beholden to instinct. Herein lay an opportunity, one he could rewrite and nourish, or let pass into his daydreams like his lost lover. Whatever he had been, whatever he could be...whoever he would end up being...all the colors ran together. He had one opportunity to pick up the brush. “B…”

The white crown she wore lilted with the angle of her head.

The Keeper cleared his throat. “Blue,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out my new Bas'ir icon lovingly crafted by @ifrit_egi on Twitter :')
> 
> Happy fucking New Year.


	8. Things You Think of Later - E

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter Eight - E**  
>  G'raha attempts something new and finds moderate success with his partner.  
> The Warrior of Light has some ethical concerns about the Scions of the Seventh Dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter hits all three of my trademarks pretty hard. That is all I will say.
> 
> :)

“Bas’ir.”

“Hmm?”

“Let’s do something...unusual tonight.”

“...no. I’ve got quite enough on my agenda. Examine this tome, draft my thoughts on the matter, shower...have _very normal_ sex.”

“ _Normal_?”

“Yes! I’ve not time enough to add something _unusual_ into the mix, you silly man.”

“It’s not adding. It’s _making a modification._ ”

“It’s emotional addition. If you don’t recognize that, well...let me tie _you_ up.”

“I will! If you can overpower me.”

"If I can…"

Bas'ir's brain caught up with his tongue and he froze completely. That twist-tailed Miqo'te had his attention just as well as a _fire_ in the same spot on the mattress would have. And when pink bloomed on his face and in his lungs, he wondered how much more trouble it would have been if his bed _really had_ ignited.

"How dare you." Bas'ir said.

"What?" Eyes trained on his companion, Raha rolled onto his back and unclasped the highest button of his vest.

"I won't forget this."

"Won't forget what?"

"How _irresponsible_ you are."

"Right, because _you're_ such a good influence on me."

Feeling light, he lurched forward on his knees and tried to disguise the weakness as a deliberate attack. It didn't land with as much force as he'd wanted, but he latched onto Raha's neck and tried to roll him nonetheless.

Tried _unsuccessfully_. Raha had Bas'ir's throat wrapped safely in his hands soon enough. Using his legs, he flipped the Keeper and rose to straddle him. He wanted to get on with it that moment—free himself and his partner of the clothing that kept them from connecting—but a warm vibration stopped him. "Bas'ir…?"

"Y-yes?" His voice was tiny, as it ought to have been with pressure on his neck.

"Are you...are you _purring?_ "

Bas’ir blinked and tried to wriggle away from the question.

The grip was too strong. “You _are_. Oh _gods_ , Bas’ir.”

“I am _not_.” His teeth clicked together at the word.

“You’ve made me a very happy man.”

“I’m not _purring._ Banish the thought.”

“Fine.” The Seeker released his neck and let his thumbs trail down to Bas’ir’s collarbone, his sternum. “But try and deny how quickly your silly heart is beating now.” They waited together, breath whispering through their lips, tails thumping without rhythm on the mattress.

And Bas’ir pouted—but listened. Not just to his own heart, but to Raha’s, too. What he heard was a song wanting for words, lyrics he’d someday memorize if he had his way. And he knew he’d have to do anything the man asked. “Raha,” he said, wincing.

“My friend.” He leaned forward and cupped the back of his head in his arms, brought his lips to the tender skin of his neck and sucked.

Nervousness colored Bas'ir's face, pulled his eyebrows high—but excitement drove his arms to encircle the warmth of Raha's back, to will those full lips closer, deeper, longer. By then all he could think was mantra— _I love this man, I love him, let me be loved back_. The fresh pain those words wound kept him from noticing his back rising from the mattress.

Raha grunted. "You're not as heavy as you look."

“Huh? I—” Bas’ir clung with all his limbs out of instinct, having realized Raha planned on carrying him somewhere across the room. “Put me down.”

“I will.”

“What are you doing?” Squirming didn’t help.

“I’m going to put you down.”

“Ah!” The desk chair reared back on two legs, and Bas’ir clawed into his carrier for dear life. “Don’t let me—don’t let me fall.”

A few awkward grips and adjustments later, the chair was in order with Bas’ir seated like an anxious bachelor. Raha put his hands on his hips. “Please—have a little faith.”

The Keeper rolled his eyes and hit his tail on the side of the chair. “So, what will you have me do next?”

“Where do you keep your scarves?”

“Oh, for the love of—”

“I’ll find them myself. Why don’t you save me the effort and rid yourself of your clothes?” He fiddled again with his own top and meandered towards an old wooden dresser.

Bas’ir squinted. “I’ve half a mind to have you do all the work.”

“Now, now. If things go my way, you’ll find yourself fully incapable of working too hard.” The vest came off. Raha set it on the bed and started pulling drawers open, flipping through fabrics.

And as for his companion...Bas’ir found himself a bit more amenable the longer he squinted at those strong shoulders, that russet tail. He cleared his throat and unclasped his belt. “The closet. Left side.”

_____________

“Well? Does it feel good?”

Raha eased Bas’ir’s head up with a smile, like he’d finished building a bookshelf, not binding a man with his own scarves. As amateurish as he felt, he liked what he saw. One fabric bound the Keeper’s hands at the back. Two other pieces kept his ankles close to the chair’s front legs. A final scarf circled his head over his eyes. The excess fabric cascaded over his shoulder.

“Well...it...it’s not that it feels good in a physical sense. Rather…” Bas’ir bit his lip. _I feel good in a spiritual way. To be with someone I trust and adore. To be beholden to you, and only you. Totally beholden._ “...I’m not sure. It’s just nice.”

“Oh, nice, is it?”

“Sure. You’ll find out yourself soon enough.”

“Sure.” Raha leaned to the side and curled his fingers around the base of Bas’ir’s tail. It was soft, warm, and, when he drew down to the tip, ripe with tension. At release, it twitched like lazy lightning. “Should I bind this too, then?”

The Keeper grumbled and thumped blindly at the other man’s hip? Waist? Or was that his arm?

It was his inner thigh. He rubbed his mouth to hold back a chuckle. Theoretically he could do anything he wanted, and more than a few ideas had come to mind. But something about the curve of Bas’ir’s shoulders, strained back as they were to accommodate the scarf at his wrists, made him look stronger than he probably was. And something about that strength gave Raha an entirely new idea.

“I trust you’ll stay put, then,” Bas’ir heard the Seeker say before a follow-up of footsteps.

“What?”

“I’ll be back soon enough.”

“You’re _leaving? With me like this_?”

“Shush.”

Bas’ir grimaced and tried to pull his ankles away from the chair. He had a bit of room. In a pinch, he probably could have slipped out...but instead of planning a daring escape, he strained his ears to paint a picture of what Raha might be up to. “I know you’re not really leaving,” he yelled. “I can hear you fiddling around out there.”

A door shut elsewhere in his quarters. The dance of Bas’ir’s tail stopped for just a moment, before he reasoned Raha must have slinked away to the _lavatory_ , not to the hallway.

“You think you’re quite sly, don’t you,” Bas’ir said. “When you said ‘unusual,’ I didn’t think you’d mean _boring_.” He wasn't bored, of course. His heart was racing. With excitement, he noted, for now...but after a while the thought of Raha abandoning him in a more permanent fashion started chipping as his lusty confidence. The fear was too deep-seated not to make an appearance, even in a scenario both of them could otherwise completely enjoy.

The door creaked back open.

“Couldn’t commit to your charade, hmm? Perhaps you even bored yourself.” Though Bas’ir heard approaching footsteps, he had to admit he was surprised he hadn’t managed to fish a snarky response from the man who so often enabled him.

But a response _did_ come—

“No charade, my friend. I simply needed to prepare.”

Bas'ir's ears ticked back. He’d both felt and heard the footsteps stop not far from his spot in the chair. “Prepare what?”

A sunny laugh trickled from Raha’s lips. “Myself. And now you.” A wet hand slicked Bas’ir’s length—it didn’t take long for him to harden completely—and not long after that, the Seeker straddled him and brought his entrance down to the Keeper’s tip.

“Oh! Ah…” Bas’ir bit his lip. The binds caught him before his body could express just how _good_ it felt. “That’s...something…”

“Are you surprised?” Raha huffed and lowered his ass until he was resting on the other man’s thighs.

“Hmph. You tie me up and won’t even...won’t even fuck me while you’ve got me compromised?”

He arched back and savored the hardness inside him. Whether the bulk of the sensation came from physical or mental ministrations, he wasn’t sure, but _gods_ was it hard to sound like he knew what he was doing when he really just wanted to double down and make a fool of himself. “A man plans, and the gods laugh.”

Bas’ir’s eyebrows knitted beneath the makeshift blindfold. As silly as he’d felt letting Raha test knots on his body parts, he felt quite fine now. Great, even. But there was room for improvement. Something really pushing him closer—the bitten sounds coming from Raha’s mouth. He moved at a steady pace, but his breath kept anything but that. Every now and then he’d ride slower, deeper, and a crisp inhalation would make Bas’ir’s ear twitch, make him buck in his restraints. “Raha,” he said after a while.

It took the Seeker a second to call back. “Hmm?”

He twisted his lips. “You sound like you are working very hard.”

“I said you wouldn’t have to work much.”

Bas’ir grunted. The places where skin met skin were growing hot and slick with sweat. “I would like very much to...see you labor so.” No reply came, but a hand slipped from his shoulder and never returned. “...are you touching yourself?”

“That’s not your business.”

He swallowed hard. “I could do that for you if you…chose to loosen one of these restraints.”

Though the dark-haired man certainly hadn’t shut his mouth entirely, Raha was struck by how quietly he spoke. Either that—or the idea of being watched filled his mind with excuses to acquiesce. “Fine,” he said. “Although, as you know, I worked very hard to deprive you of your sight, I shall make this one small sacrifice.” Raha rose on his knees so the lovers were _just_ connected.

Bas’ir gulped. He felt an arm on either side of his head and knew his friend was working at the knot, even though he could have simply pulled the damn scarf off. Light fabric danced at his shoulders and slipped to the ground. When he opened his eyes, Raha’s slitted pupils dilated. “Now I have done something for you,” the Seeker said, cocking his head. “Do something for me.”

“What.”

"I want you to purr again."

Bas’ir’s hands tightened over one another behind the chair. "But that's so...so embarrassing, you realize."

“You’ll have to trust me, then...” He pursed his lips and cupped the Keeper’s ear the way he might’ve handled some cherished relic. “...when I tell you I’ll embarrass myself shortly after the moment you decide to give me what I want.”

Bas’ir managed a laugh, more breath than mirth. “You’ve no plans to force it out of me?”

“Please.” Those mismatched eyes begged even as they shuddered to a close. Raha loosened his thighs and slowly brought himself down again, breathing out. “Consider it a favor.”

But he couldn’t plead anymore. He couldn't pretend to need it. He was too close to focus on anything but riding Bas’ir in earnest and tempering the stroke of his own hand for as long as his want would let him. A bit upset that he’d taken the blindfold off, he nevertheless managed to place his free hand around his friend’s neck, hoping to draw out that tantalizing reaction once more.

Bas’ir looked thoughtful in the low light. For once, Raha seemed almost as vulnerable as the Keeper knew himself to be. Quieting his own sounds of pleasure, Bas’ir drank in his friends unhindered moans. Seeing that man lift himself, work himself—watching and sensing the shake of his thighs, the red of his face, feeling him tighten and hold his breath—Bas’ir could do naught but give him what he wanted after all.

Raha felt the purr before he heard it. He gasped into a full smile and opened his eyes wide to the sight of Bas’ir turning his head away, biting his lip. Raha moaned his name and came down hard on his cock—before spilling onto his chest his very next stroke.

The Keeper arched his back against the wood. “Raha...I…” _Want more_.

But Raha figured the rest out for himself, ever mindful of his partner even as heat raced through his skin. He lurched forward, set his hands at the Keeper’s nipples, and worked through the thunder. A layer of sweat coated his body, but the pleasure sent chills down his spine.

Bas’ir saw stars before he jerked his head back and strained against his binds, seeking something even deeper for his release. The floor creaked to the involuntary fever beat of his aching thighs. Whatever part of him worried about tipping the chair over was gone. Now he didn’t worry. He just wanted, fucked, and _finally_ found release.

Raha dug his fingernails into Bas’ir’s shoulders and sang at the sudden warmth filling him. Neck limp and limbs loosening as he rode those final ebbs of pleasure, he found his mind telling him to be _impressed_ with how much rapture a body could feel or bring. Surely this was synergy at its finest. This meant something—it meant something so powerful, he could almost taste in the aether.

When Bas’ir’s length throbbed only in afterglow, he finally relaxed his shoulders. The cool sweat on the back of the chair made him gasp. “Gods, I love…” he said—and then cleared his throat. “I love...these nights.”

Raha draped himself over Bas’ir’s shoulders and squeezed. “And yet you were...so unwilling not long ago.”

“Always willing.” _With you_. “But you know very well I’ll have no fun if I’m not allowed to complain.”

A lengthy sigh ran over the Keeper’s shoulders. Raha pressed a smile into his skin. “Well, next time I’ll use that last scarf for your mouth rather than your eyes. We shall see if that solves the problem.”

________________

Amandine the Elezen sat sprawled over a crate outside her post near Black Brush Station. Somewhere between her third and fourth bell, she’d grown bored, hungry, and curious. Peeking inside her impromptu sitting place satisfied all three conditions: previously unbeknownst to her, she and her fellow Flame had been charged with guarding an entire shipment of...could they really be...Ixali apples? A food normally given to mounts, not men, Amandine still felt quite right about biting out a chunk under the Ul’dahn haze.

“Oy. Amandine,” called a voice from below. Far below. Her partner’s head barely cleared the top of the crate. “Isn’t that fellow famous, or something?”

“Hm?” She raised her head from the wood and followed the tip of the Lalafell’s pointing finger. Near the chocobo stables walked a tiny man—a Miqo’te, not a Lalafell— with a pained expression, like he had a rock in his boot. Amandine sat up so she could deliver an incredulous smirk. “Him? I highly doubt it.”

“No really,” Tokepi Hokatepi said with a hand on his scruffy blond beard. “That limp. And he’s got a bow, too. It must be him.”

“Him who, precisely…?” The sun bore down on Amandine at a different, stronger angle in her upright position. The apple had left a sour taste in her mouth. _Should have stayed in Ishgard._

“You know, the one they say fought the primal.” He turned back and scoffed at Amandine like she’d asked him to marry her. “Surely you heard Cap talking about it? Sounded like a right _devotee_ , he did. Most likely happy someone else took care of a mess he’d have had to clean up.”

She rubbed her forehead. “You mean _we’d_ have had to clean up.”

“Sure. But on my honor— _that man_ did it for us, and all on his lonesome, so they say.”

Amandine took another look at the man in question. She couldn’t tell what it was precisely—fear or anticipation? Discomfort? He was almost certainly waiting on something, otherwise he’d not have been kicking stones about by the stables. “And what exactly makes you think _this_ is the man who fought a primal?”

“Oy! You there!” Loud and proud, the Lalafell shouted. Amandine rolled her eyes.

The Miqo’te looked both ways before landing on the Flames. “Can I help you?” His ears drooped from their pert position, almost like he was embarrassed at having been addressed. With his head turned towards her, Amandine could see sweat glistening on his forehead. The scarf was a bit much. Perhaps a native could have managed it, but this man had to be a foreigner...not that the rest of his ensemble left any room for doubt.

Tokepi thrust his index forward. “It _is_ you, isn’t it? You’re the man who fought Ifrit?”

He twisted his lips around and squinted so hard Amandine lost the whites of his eyes. “I...I might have been there.”

“I _knew_ it!” Tokepi smiled, but the man did not. The furrow of his brow was so pronounced that Amandine almost thought to wave her partner down, urge him to leave the stranger alone, but the sun left her a bit less willing to act on anything. A bored soldier’s reflexes had nothing on a determined Lalafell. “Say, what was your name anyway?" Tokepi said. "Starts with a _B_ doesn’t it?”

Pursed lips. “Blue.” Pursed lips again.

With his hands on his hips, Tokepi waddled backwards. “Blue, huh?” He stared like he was watching the sunset. “Well, I suppose that wouldn't make for much of an autograph.”

____________

The guards’ attention was enough to convince Bas’ir to make for his chocobo and get a move on.

Sure, he thought, they saw the limp, the bow, the scarf, the _scar_ \- but they didn’t see how he’d cowered in the corner of nearly every airship he’d ridden since he first carried Kan-E-Senna’s message to Limsa Lominsa, then to Ul’dah. They didn’t see how he shook each time he teleported —not often, if he could help it—or how his chocobo had reared back and sent him flying yalms away the first dozen times he’d tried to mount him. They didn’t know the scar-pink line beneath his left eye appeared after a tussle with an Elezen drunkard, not a _god_.

And speaking of gods—

It was best not to. Speaking of gods conjured images of flame. Sometimes Bas’ir felt them in his sleep as real as the night he’d felt them encircling him in the desert. But the flames were merely an echo of what really haunted him. Yes, they saw the _hero_ who fought Ifrit, the man who went toe to toe with a bright and bestial force of un-nature. But they didn’t see the tempered captives behind him, long-doomed and shaking in adoration.

When Ifrit fell, so did Bas’ir—Blue—to the tepid earth. His eyes couldn’t shut right. His fingers froze around his bow like claws. And worst of all, it was so hot he felt like the sweat coating his skin, drenching his clothes could boil. For a while, that was _all_ he felt. _If I’m not careful I shall melt. I am melting_. Better to focus on the veritable, tangible things than their implications. The shadow rather than the man.

Thancred and a host of other fighters came upon him eventually, but by that time the crystal had entranced him. When that force—Hydaelyn, if he had no choice but to believe it—finally let him go, he refused to stand, walk, and tell his tale. Instead, Thancred rooted him from the dirt and tried not to notice the fingernails pushing into his skin, the sickened twitching of his tail; the thought that Blue had seen much and suffered more made him disgusted with himself. Shaking, Blue kept his eyes clenched shut and his mouth frozen open the way back to Camp Drybone. They’d set him on a cot and worked away the grime on his face and neck, but only when they blew out the candle did he feel like he could rest.

Thinking that those soldiers heard only rumors of his triumph made Bas’ir nauseous—would that _he_ felt the triumph as verily as they, so its creeping afterglow did not keep him up at night.

He entered the stables and spotted his bird, beady-eyed and red-tinged. With greens still hanging from his beak, he regarded Bas’ir with an animal look so mean the Keeper thought of his mother...and nearly turned around. He shook the thought out and looked down. “D...Donatello,” he said. “Shall we… away?”

The bird snorted and went for another clump of greens.

Bas’ir clenched and unclenched his fingers. “Now, I’ll have none of that. We really ought to make for Vesper Bay.”

“Kweh.”

“Donatello, please.” He stepped closer and looked over his shoulder before continuing in a whisper. “Please, Donatello, I beg of thee. Make this easy for once.”

Donatello quirked his head and swallowed. Was this...a look of concession? Permission? _Respect?_

Doubtful. But Bas’ir led him from the stables anyway, holding the reins like candy glass. He kept his eyes off the soldiers, though he felt _their_ eyes on his back, and wandered to the far side of Black Brush Station where none could see him make an attempt at mounting the bird.

“Kweh,” the bird said, eyeing the wall behind which his keeper hid. But Bas’ir read his musing as a taunt: _What, are you afraid to let the others watch you struggle?_

“Shush, you…” Tongue at his fangs, he focused on the distance, shuffled his feet in anticipation, then jumped...and not quite high enough.

“Shite!”

“Kweh!”

He kicked off the wall and swung over in a flurry of limb and tail. Donatello was _not_ happy with the shift in weight, and instead of giving his rider time to settle in the saddle, he surged forward with aggression.

Bas’ir pulled against the momentum and tried to bring his shoulders forward. “Wait wait! Not like this!”

Donatello bleated and sped to a gallop, kicking up dust as he went.

“Ah—at least go in the right direction!” The rush disoriented him, but he dared not spin his head around to place himself. By the time he finally felt his body straighten out, his tail settle behind him, he opened his eyes and found himself rapidly approaching his destination after all. He ran gloved fingers through his hair. "Seven Hells.”

The air tasted dry but not stale. That night in the Amalj’aa camp he’d come to realize how alive the desert was, for better or worse. Always some sound sought to pry his ears in another direction, some threat or curiosity. He thought someday he’d return to Thanalan (perhaps in disguise, as it might happen) with a notebook and pen to observe the natural world more deliberately. What conclusions might he come upon? Why, he’d feel like a bonafide Archon working so closely to the denizens of Eorzea and all their commerce, commotion, confusion.

For the rest of the ride, he focused on what must have been a genetic flaw—whatever compelled him to tighten his scarf and consider buying a heavier jacket, even as the sun slicked his forehead.

Speaking with Minfilia, once cordial and calm, now unnerved him. For all the good they did, there was something ugly about the Scions. Their leaders Sharlayans, their sacrifices common folk, and great in number—from Bas’ir’s perspective he could never quite feel at ease with the way things worked. And his discomfort made even simple reports difficult to give and receive.

Each time he entered the Solar, he saw a beautiful woman and remembered an unsavory reality: the tempered would always die. They would always be killed.

“Dear Antecedent,” he said this time after hearing the new orders. His lips twisted to balance the right words; to speak his feelings, not his facts. For all his days as a student, he spent not a minute speaking explicitly of them, but he despised being thought of as some brutish layman. Sure, his academic focus was less _practical_ than most, but _all_ academics shared at least a respect for _curiosity_ and _questions_ and _impossible answers._ “I must inform you once again: though an adventurer I may seem…” He set a hand on his chest. “‘Tis a scholar’s heart I possess. And as a scholar, I cannot be—nay, I shan’t be satisfied with such a terminal explanation.”

Minfilia tilted her head and clasped her collar. “Blue,” she said. “That I cannot offer a more favorable solution pains me.”

He believed her but felt bitter nonetheless.

“All I can give is reassurance,” she continued, “that it is our sincere belief the path we have chosen will lead ultimately to the brightest future for Eorzea and her people.”

His gaze veered off. “I understand.”

 _But no_ , he kept thinking. _This is not the kind of man I’d like to be. This is not the kind of man he is, either. Surely._

Raha, of course, Raha in his thoughts as he trudged into his room at the Waking Sands and slammed the door. He tossed his bow aside, kicked his boots off, and landed on the bed with his arms already crossed.

Raha.

He swallowed hard and undid his scarf.

Would his friend even recognize him now?

No. Surely not. He looked nothing like the sour scholar he used to be. Not with his tattered tail, unkempt hair...his body so small, spare the new muscles of his arms. Sharlayan food was nothing to write home about, but _regular meals_ would have been nice the past seven moons.

What would Raha think? Would he still sing for him in the middle of the night? Or would he recognize him as the lowly errand boy he’d become?

_For all your sour faces, you are an excellent companion._

Bas’ir groaned into his palm like he didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that his left hand had already slipped to his belt, that he was already straining against the fabric of his trousers. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched himself, tried not to, tried not to think of anything that would tempt him, distract him from his path, from his godsdamn _debt_. That same restraint doomed him now, for he knew he’d have to finish several times before his body let him sleep. Let him learn to forget again. Let him pretend. Ignore the ugly truth. The unsavory reality.

With his trousers down, he threw his sweater at the door—it hung on the doorknob—and leaned back onto the bed. The first orgasm poured easily onto his abdomen, almost instantly, so fast he hardly slowed the stroke of his left hand. He came from touch alone, no fantasy, no ideation, no conjured memory. Years of debauchery had taught him the second wouldn’t be so easy.

He kept slicking himself and winced through what he knew would be a brief period of oversensitivity. Soon, he twitched to the thought of nights remembered, of risky trysts he always knew he’d dream of later.

Was it really so long ago he’d come to bother Raha in his _office_? He’d have laughed if it weren’t so damn sad. But the want was surging verily once again, an incessant buzzing in his ears. The want thought only of the night that followed, not the morning, nor the morning after that, nor the bloody moons thenceforth.

He cupped his balls and curved his fingers around his member again. With a new grip he ringed himself slowly, feeling all the ridges of his hand, pretending they belonged to someone else. Sometimes he almost bought it. In those moments, he’d smile and sigh back into the pillow, closing his eyes and gently bucking up into his imagined partner, make-believing he had someone to bitch and bite at.

But he did bite at his blanket. By the time he managed a second release, he was sweating harder than he had been outside, and breathing so loudly that nosy passersby would likely have heard him. He tapped his fangs with his tongue and eyed the door, knowing he’d have to pull one more to come close to something resembling satisfaction. But first, he let his arms fall to his sides, his eyes flutter shut. He thought of those guards. Would they be impressed if they saw him now? Huffing into his sheets and dappled in his own seed? Unlikely, if they knew anything about Miqo’te.

 _How ridiculous_ , he thought, _to be embarrassing myself like some touch-starved scholar._ But in his happiest days, he hadn’t been touch-starved at all. So, as he chased something final, he smiled and thought shamelessly of Raha—the most beautiful lover and most magnificent creature he’d ever beheld. He thought of riding him or filling him or sucking him, swallowing after—of staying up too late and taking too many showers—of dragging fangs over the soft of his ears.

Without thinking much about it, he whipped his tail from his side to his mouth and gingerly bit at its tip. It felt better than he thought it would, like a stranger had hold of him. Nevertheless, he dug his heels into the mattress, brought his right hand to his chest, and strained until finally his body _let_ him let go.

Physically. Panting, red-faced, and sweating, he wondered if it would feel so powerful to finally let go emotionally as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nipples? Check.  
> Jacking off? check.  
> Being sad?
> 
> :/
> 
> Check.


	9. Things You Keep In Your Pocket - T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter Nine - T** \- Bas'ir's personal problems are spilling into the affairs of the Scions, and Thancred wants to do something about it.

Minfilia thought highly of Blue, but that didn’t make it easy to be around him.

When he stayed at the Waking Sands, he spent much of his time talking and talking loudly. She often heard him from the Solar. _Well, you mustn’t have read Ergegaard’s treatise on morality… If Lominsan scholars put even a moment’s thought into beast tribe relations… What men seldom realize about historians is…_ When she found herself amused by a rant, she would drift into the common room and spy him gesticulating and ambling about, usually with his eyes closed and his tail twirling. She would smile and linger by the door until he noticed. To her dismay, he would usually clear his throat and return to whatever task he’d set for himself upon recognizing her presence. Back to his journaling, his accounts, his brooding. He seemed distant from the Archons, and wary of Y'shtola in particular.

And though his comments certainly had implications about his background, he was never keen on referencing his past directly. When asked about his personal life, he would crinkle his nose, rub his elbow, look to the side. Minfilia wondered if there were aught he’d like to say; his expression always hinted at bitter restraint. For his sake or for hers, she couldn’t discern.

And perhaps strangest of all was his relationship to that mysterious man of whom he complained from time to time. Minfilia was not wont to pry, but she had gathered from his mumblings something about something about his mother, something about debt. Poisonous as Blue’s voice sounded in general, he made proper toxins of those topics. The only antidote she had found was a change of subject, and a quick one at that.

Still...after observing his behavior for moons, she made a practice of arranging larger portions for his meals. It seemed his money was not always going straight to his pockets, and she couldn’t quite figure why.

_______

“You look thin.” The Elezen cocked his head back, revealing the cold eyes hiding beneath the brim of his big black hat. As always, he was dressed for a funeral. Or perhaps the events immediately preceding one. Ishgardian though he was, the coat looked suited best for intimidation, not for keeping warm.

Bas’ir stood across from him, hands planted on the back of one of two wooden chairs in the inn room. Neither party deigned to sit. Never did. On the table sat a half-filled coin pouch, its once-bright fabric now dulled from use to the color of uncooked meat. “I’ve always looked like this, or worse,” Bas’ir said. “You’ve just never seen my bare arms before.”

The Elezen leaned over and pushed the coin pouch forward with his index finger. “Am I to understand you’ve sold your sleeves to afford what you’ve collected here?” His black hair fell over his shoulders, so dark it almost looked wet.

That someone, even this perpetual aggressor, would doubt his ability to budget angered Bas’ir. “I’ve collected what you specified. No more no less. Now you’ve come to collect it in turn, yes?” He crossed his arms and sneered. “So collect it. I’ve not solicited your judgment.”

“‘Tis not yours to solicit, but mine to give.” He produced his own coin purse and let Bas’ir’s gil clink inside before sending the empty container across the table and into the Keeper's lap. Then, with a flourish, the Ishgardian flattened his coat. “I hear you have taken on some high profile work. House Dzemael trusts we shan’t be associated with your newfound _fame_.” His thin lips curled up at the word.

“Hmph.” He closed his eyes. “If you’d been paying attention you’d know that I’m not even associated with my own renown.”

Hands to the side, he twirled around for the door, spurring his gaudy coattails into a dance. “Yes, but your favorite color is.”

Bas’ir grumbled and watched that man’s stupid hair sway back over his ornamented shoulders.

“Same amount next time.”

“Begone.” At the crack of the door shutting, Bas’ir deflated. _Blue is not my favorite color,_ he thought. _It’s the one I hate the most_. And then, grimacing, he chided himself for thinking something so dramatic and juvenile.

In some ways, this Elezen was one of the few people Bas’ir could speak freely with. In fact, House Dzemael knew more about the Keeper’s history than he himself had ever cared to learn. The mysteries of his mother, his days of study, his sudden return to Gridania...and subsequent trials as a fledgling adventurer. So yes—it _was_ a relief for the man in black to finish his business and walk out the door, but when Bas’ir inevitably willed himself back to the Waking Sands, he would build a wholly different wall: one that separated the sixth Bahani son from _Blue_.

Before leaving the inn room, Bas’ir chanced a look in the mirror. With the delicacy of one affixing a cravat, he straightened his scarf, wondering if he ought to cut his shaggy hair or let it grow; punctuate the fact that this lowly archer simply _could not_ be a man used to an existence more privileged. The pack on his back, hanging limp beneath his bow, looked about as light as it felt. His vest was cheap but _clean_ , at least—more than some adventurers could say—and as for his arms? A tad pink from the sun, but nothing to sneer at. Though perhaps the Elezen had correctly identified his new penchant for sleeveless shirts as a mark of pride...and thought to prod at it.

 _He must really love his job,_ Bas’ir thought. _Amateur debt collector and professional bastard._

Bas’ir’s tail twitched when he finally let the door click behind him. Shifting his eyes to the end of the hallway, he saw a familiar but unexpected face and narrowed his eyes.

“Don’t suppose you’d like company, Mr. Bahani?” Thancred lifted himself from the wall and uncrossed his arms.

_Shite._

Bas’ir turned his head away as fast as he could and made for the exit. “No, thank you.”

“Bas’ir, Blue, either—just a chat, if you would.”

Footsteps behind him. “I should hope you’ll do _no_ chatting, after whatever it is you think you’ve seen.”

“Blue.” Thancred reached for the Keeper’s pack. Both of them stopped.

Bas’ir looked back and tried to hold a snarl, but it was too much. If the Scion pulled hard enough, he’d probably unravel like a spool of thread.

“For Minfilia’s sake,” Thancred said. “Just a chat.”

Bas’ir felt like the man had spat in his eye. “A chat?”

“I’ve kept a secret or two in my lifetime.”

The sternness of Thancred’s voice made him blush in shame. Because at the end of the day, _that_ is what this was all about: shame. Shame he couldn’t return to his studies, to the life he was willing to ask for, to...someone. Erasing Bas’ir Bahani was necessary for the man who bore his name to survive. He wouldn't make it if he had to admit that the Miqo'te who once scrawled late night notes in the hallowed halls of learning and the Miqo'te who'd nearly lost an ear to an imp were the same person. His eyes fluttered shut. “Very well.”

“Excellent.” Thancred sat his hand on his shoulder. “Shall we, then?”

\-----

Blue had not spent much time in taverns, and this was something Thancred picked up on quite easily. The quiet whip of his tail, his low ears, those wide and watchful yellow eyes—his discomfort was as plain as the fabric around his neck and the guilt in his expression. So, where precisely had he spent his days before taking up the bow?

“Well,” the adventurer said after taking a seat and clasping his hands together. They had picked a table away from most of the folks gathered at Buscarron's Druthers, but the inconspicuous spot didn’t seem to ease his nerves. “I can only imagine what you saw. And the conclusions to which you have jumped.”

“I’m not quick to judge,” Thancred said, shifting his eyes about the room. “Though an onze of clarity can go a long way.”

“Did she send you after me?” With a look of desperation, his hands came apart and squeezed the edge of the table.

“No.”

“So long as perform my duties, I—”

“This meeting is a product of my own initiative.”

“I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

Thancred tapped his finger on the wood of the table. “My business, no. On a _personal_ level, I am concerned.”

The Keeper brought out his familiar pout, and for the first time in half a bell looked like himself. “I can take care of myself.”

“Not for you, but for _her_.” He leaned in for emphasis. “Your comings and goings worry her more than you realize.”

“Tch.” Beneath the table, his foot tapped like a hare’s heartbeat. “Well, you may assure her she has no reason to worry.”

“Perhaps I will.” Thancred leaned back in his seat and puffed out his chest a tad, cocked his head to the side. “But you’re going to have to give me _something_ to work with.”

“What then? What shall I give? You’d best not expect me to spill my body of secrets over a stiff drink or two.”

“Hardly.” The music of a lute drifted into the tavern from somewhere nearby. Thancred watched a few heads turn toward the door, each seeking the source of the sound. Their calm curiosity brought a smile to his face. “A whole body of secrets, you say? Let’s begin with the Elezen.”

“You may consider him a neutral party,” Bas’ir said. “He will neither aid nor hinder the Scions’ mission.”

“And his relationship to you is…?”

“There is no relationship. He is simply doing his job.” The Keeper held his chin high, then winced and rubbed his forehead. “Poorly phrased. What I should say is—he is—I am—”

“A wanted man?”

“No. I am...deeply in debt.” The tapping of his foot stopped. “And so shall I be for the rest of my days, if I’m not careful about it. This is no secret, though perhaps the severity of my predicament is.”

Thancred recalled the looming figure he’d seen at the inn, the gilded musketoon at his hip. “You’ve found yourself entangled with quite the debt collector.”

“Oh, I certainly know…” His thin lips twisted. “So there you have it. I am destined to be a poor man for the indefinite future. But this shall hardly hinder my performance.”

Thancred narrowed his eyes. _Performance._ It was an interesting word for an adventurer to use. And this wasn’t the first time Bas’ir had taken an unusual route to the end of a sentence. He just as easily may have said _I can still fight_ or _Money has naught to do with my aim_. It was almost as if he expected a grade at the end of the day. “Have you convinced yourself Minfilia cares only about performance? Her comrades are people first. And I know this may come as a shock to you, but you are one of her comrades...and a person.”

Bas’ir frowned and shook his head. “I told you, she needn’t worry.”

Thancred rubbed his forehead. “How did you get tangled up in this? Where are you from?”

“Here. If you must know.” He waved his arm above his head and gestured backwards. “I spent the bulk of my childhood in these woods. I am a Keeper of the Moon. This is not unheard of.”

“Certainly not. And your family?”

“Whence do you presume this debt came?” Bitterness lit his tone. “I adopted a new name to avoid the negative stigma I inherited from...from them. And now I am alone.”

A quick roll of the eyes. “And Minfilia needn’t worry?”

Bas’ir’s gaze flickered up from the table. “Precisely.”

“Yes, well. Consider _me_ convinced.”

“What, pray tell, are you trying to accomplish? I have no more to tell you. There’s no more I _can_ tell you.” The tip of his tail was about even with his shoulders now, waving to and fro.

 _He’s leaving questions unanswered,_ Thancred thought, _but there’s certainly no room to doubt his emotional state._ “No ‘body of secrets’ to share?”

The Keeper’s eyebrow quirked. “No. Are you satisfied?”

“You are a very, _very_ suspicious man. You know that? I say this having been a suspicious man myself.”

“Interesting use of a past tense.” Crossing his arms, Bas’ir let his gaze sweep over the rest of the room. The corner of his lip twitched up like his eyes had fallen upon something unpleasant. “It is getting late.”

“Let’s make a deal, Bas’ir.” Now, Thancred clasped his hands together and leaned forward on the table. Going in for the kill. “You don't have to tell me the details. But tell Minfilia.”

His ears surged back. “What? No. ‘Tis embarrassing enough for _you_ to have seen me in this way.”

“Nothing wrong with needing a bit of help now and again. And who knows, perhaps the Scions’ coffers could make your problem disappear.”

“We have far more important things to spend money on.”

“Look,” Thancred said, lowering his chin. “I’m going to be blunt with you. You’re good with a bow, but you are gods-awful with people.”

His lip twitched a bit, but he held eye contact. “I don’t have to be good with people if I’m able to accomplish the tasks set before me.”

“Listen. Your…” Thancred gestured with his hand, trying to pluck the right word out of the air. “...attitude is so potent, it’s rubbing off on people I care about. People who care about you. And people who have enough to worry about without our bard slinking around like every day’s the morning after.”

“The morning…?”

“Don’t get distracted.” He tapped the table twice. “Suffice it to say, I’m convinced Minfilia would have an easier time playing _her_ role if you let her help. You, sir, have locked her out.”

The fire drained from the Keeper’s face. As his tail drooped, so did his whole body seem to wilt a bit over the table. “I...have tried to explain...why I remain distant…”

“And must you remain distant?”

“I...there are differences between my own philosophy and that of the Antecedent.”

“And that’s fine.” Thancred turned his head to the side and raised his eyebrows. Minfilia had mentioned Blue's concerns in passing. “But it has nothing to do with the fact that your personal problems are no longer personal.”

“They _are_.”

“They are _not_.” Thancred sat up straight and crossed his legs, looking down on the shorter man—a not-so-subtle attempt at physical intimidation. He didn’t feel guilty at all. “Tell me they’re not when Minfilia isn’t moping around with a heartbroken look on her face, thinking she’s turned a man with morals into a mercenary.”

Bas’ir’s left eye twitched once, twice before he bowed his head so low he was close to pressing his nose into the table. “Mercenary…” he said.

Thancred blinked at him. It would be good to let the words ring about his head for a while, even though he was starting to look like an unwatered plant. This was the man Thancred had carried from the Amalj’aa camp, the man who had felled Ifrit with his bow and a blessing. But that was no excuse. Primal slayer or no, he was in many ways a mildly unpleasant creature. The type you felt sad just for having looked at.

“Am I a mercenary?” Bas’ir said, pushing his bangs back. “Am I not? No. I am a debtor and a mercenary, albeit one with particular gifts.” Standing, he swept his hand across the table like he was dusting it off. His eyes were narrow and his lips quirked. “I have heard you. I will try to conceptualize myself as something more sophisticated for the Antecedent’s sake.”

“Come now, Blue.” Thancred joined him in standing. “Don’t think of it that way.”

“I…” He struck his chin high and closed his eyes. “Perhaps it is for my sake, as well. Has it occurred to you that this life is stranger to me than I am to you Scions? If I had my way, I would be doing other things, somewhere else entirely.”

Thancred smirked. “With other people, too, I presume?”

The Keeper fussed with his scarf before turning and looking over his shoulder. “If they would have me, perhaps.” And with that he grabbed his things and exited the establishment with a gait so stiff Thancred half-expected him to fall over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HA! No fucking in THIS chapter.


	10. Things You Carry to the Castle - T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter Ten - T** \- We get a glimpse of the life Bas'ir's mother led, and later Minfilia gets a glimpse as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not super long but you know what. This was supposed to be a one chapter fic about under-the-desk dick-sucking so we take those.

Eloise was rounding the corner with a tray full of dirty silverware when she heard a string of curses so foul she nearly lost her footing. Catching her breath, she peered down the candlelit hallway and spotted the so-called Queen of the Bastards waddling toward her room with one hand resting at her navel. Her eyes were closed and her eyebrows knitted. _Ah_ , Eloise thought. _The Gridanian. I should’ve known._ The serving girl straightened her posture and readied herself once more. She’d have to pass this very pregnant woman on her way to the kitchen, and she wanted nothing more than to do it without issuing a single word of sympathy.

Eloise couldn’t remember a time when Bas Bahani was not in the employ of House Dzemael, nor could she recall the Miqo’te having fewer privileges than she claimed now: a private room, clothes of professional make, an occasional seat at the table. She was a foreigner, a meddler, and a ruthless old witch, but here she was carrying a lord's son in her belly.

Or so rumor had it.

At least said rumor would have made sense of the rest—the foreigner’s strange advantages and Emil de Dzemael’s supposed aversions to dallying with the help. He could’ve had a great many lovers over the years, or he could’ve spent his years emotionally shackled to someone like her. And for some reason he _apparently_ chose the latter.

"Blasted…" The Miqo'te was mumbling under her breath, running her shoulder into her door. It wasn't unusual during the summer months for the wood to fall into awkward places and jam. Eloise held her chin high and ignored the curl of blonde hair bobbing in front of her eyes, having slipped her bonnet. At least she was _wearing_ a bonnet, and not romping around in an ill-fitting maternity gown meant for bodies longer, more elegant, less feral than the Gridanian's. The garment accentuated how full the woman was with child, as though any minute she might double over and birth a bastard of her very own.

Eloise, despite being a great deal younger, was about a head taller than Bas Bahani. That made it much easier to overlook whatever spite the Miqo’te held in her eyes when Eloise mouthed a simple "excuse me" and strolled past her down the hallway, offering no assistance.

But Bas had no spite for Eloise. She had practically watched her grow into the beady-eyed young woman she was now. The daughter of a chef and a housemaid, now in gentle servitude herself. Golden-haired, slender, unwedded, and apparently bitter about it. And though Bas looked down on a great many people for a great many reasons, she had no room to judge based on profession alone, count or concubine.

This young woman, though...she was ungrateful. Much as Bas mothered the Dzemael bastards, taking them in as though they had sprung forth from her own womb, she had been a present factor in Eloise's life—a tempering force, a warning, a watchful set of eyes. Bas had spent the past two decades at the Rook, nearly as many years as Eloise could claim altogether, and the ignorant girl repaid her by baring her chest before Emil, thinking her supposed innocence could sway him from a dark loyalty deeper than the depths of the Abyss.

Bas flicked her swollen tail and squinted. Just as the Elezen rounded the corner towards the kitchen, she caught a glinting eye looking backwards with curious disdain. An eye that wondered _why this old wench? Why not a fresh young thing like me? What spell has the witch cast upon our Lord Emil?_ And Bas, unasked, let the answer simmer between her fangs. There was no spell—no love, no magic bond—just _power_ between her and the rumored father of her child, and power, when wielded by capable hands, superseded all lust, all curiosity, and each force of chaos known to man.

The door gave and Bas slipped into her quarters with a grin on her face and her hands on her belly. What a miracle it was, she thought, that life had finally quickened within her. With blood, sweat, and tears, she had become mother to many sons and daughters. But this child was already hers through blood alone and would not have to hide the name she would give him.

___________

Levin struck in the night, but Minfilia had yet to sleep at all. She sat in the Solar looming over an old pock-marked parchment when something else broke the evening’s calm. Something much closer to home, and more human. With Thancred chasing Ascians, and the other Scions monitoring their given city-states, she didn't have to rack her brain to consider the source. It was Blue, as it had been for many nights now.

She almost didn't want to comfort him—not because she didn't want to help, but because she wasn't sure she _could_. A bristling man like that, a complicated, aching one was trickier than surveying stone in pure dark. She knew well enough to extend a hand to someone suffering, but how could she do it without fueling his fire? Was she cool enough to touch, or would he, burning, recoil as one burned?

Thunder crawled across the desert again, slow and rolling, loud enough to make her desk dance and to flicker the wax-addled candle upon it. She locked eyes with the flame and decided two things: she would be visiting the bard's room, and she wouldn't be bringing her candle with her. Not when the source of his nightmares was so often flame incarnate.

The rain above the Scions' lair was heavy and distant like a sad melody playing in the next room over. On her journey to his quarters, she saw not a single face, heard no voice but his occasionally rising. As she grew closer, she heard it in more detail; he offered no words in his bouts of terror, but yelled with a sense of measure, like he was carrying conversation in some angry and forgotten language. By the rhythm of it, she thought she could understand if she focused at precisely the right moment. But that moment was not now.

So she stood with her fingers curled on the wood of his door, not even broaching the doorknob. What to do. How to do it. She couldn't know which task might be harder—convincing the one known as Blue to open his heart, or working up the will to try in the first place. Thunder made the decision for her; she startled at a particularly concentrated bolt and then her fingers were touching brass, turning, pushing.

Blue pressed himself up on the bed, palms flat on the mattress, like he’d known the very second she’d be coming. “Minfilia,” he said. His voice was dry and as ghostly as the yellow flicker of his eyes.

“Blue.” She stumbled in and landed at the side of his bed. Her questions felt silly now. Taking his hand was the only path forward, outcome regardless. His skin was warm and clammy, and with it came a kind of _pop_ like epiphany, breaking static’s tension. It wasn’t real, not physically, but both of them felt it.

Blue buckled forward and groaned. He knew the Echo was calling. "I...I would like to exercise some agency in this," he said, wiping his brow. "I want you to understand because I told you. Not because it's forced by fate."

"I'll not force you." She squeezed his hand. "It's important for you to understand that if you tell me to trust you, I will. Should you believe my knowing would only trouble you further, you need only say the word. I shall hear it."

"Minfilia, I…" Whatever he wanted to say melted in his mouth. With a great, aching gasp he lurched forward and lodged his chin over her shoulder, clutched onto her back like the hells beneath were calling him. She held back and let him sob, sobbed in sympathy. And then a stinging wave crept from her torso to her temple before encircling all her senses; a spectral orchestra paved the way for her blessed mind's eye.

The Echo showed her Blue. Showed her _Bas’ir_.

___________

The Keeper escaped the Echo's grasp first. He had seen little and felt much; somewhere between him and the Antecedent grew a few tangled vines in common. Complicated thoughts about family. A touch or more of impostor syndrome. Friendship with Krile—he would need to inquire later about another scholar, though what fleeting images he saw of Minfilia's memories lacked the mismatched eyes he both sought and avoided.

By the time her connection wavered, Bas'ir was slipping into another, smaller fit of tears. She was half-convinced he'd never noticed her falling into his inner reality. She opened her mouth and let her hands hover around his shoulders. “B—”

“Don’t say it,” he said. “I don’t want it to get stuck in your head. The fewer people know, the better for me, and thus for you, too. I’m…” He turned his gaze to the tear-dappled pillow, a white-turned-blue in the low light trickling in from the hall. “I’m ashamed to have left one dream behind. Now, to move forward, I forsake it for another.”

She pulled her hands back. “For the Scions?”

“For myself.” He punctuated his words with a sniffle and a wide-eyed nod. “This is the only way I can survive. At least until I’ve got this wretched _debt_ behind me.”

She folded her hands on her lap. “We would aid you. Though our coffers aren’t as full as they may once have been, our diplomatic ties are many. We might—”

“No.” Clear and cold over her whispers. “No more debt. I don’t care if the Scions would call me friend first, debtor second. It ends here. I’m tired…” Thunder sighed with him. Nature could be sympathetic, sometimes. The wind he breathed was so deep, it stirred the tiny hairs on Minfilia’s forehead. Bas’ir—Blue—kept his shoulders low under the weight of his worry and laughed a poor man’s laugh. “I’m _so_ tired.”

Minfilia inhaled and said nothing. This time, the storm didn’t either. Only distant rain held back a heavy silence from encompassing the room. All of the Scions’ circle knew these sleepless nights had been keeping the bard’s cheeks gray and his eyes tired, but for the first time Minfilia had seen it, felt it, _lived_ it briefly, like most observers never would. No more lightning. Time for calm.

“Sleep, Blue,” she said, rising. “My voice is no match for yours, but my patience is long.” She set one hand on his forehead and another on his back to guide him down, down to the mattress. He kept his eyes open and let her. “I could tell you a story, or...”

“I’m not a child.” A familiar sting.

“No.” She kept her hand on his forehead, hot like his nightmares. If she pressed too hard, would she hear them again? The Lord of the Inferno’s taunts, an adventurer’s frenzied cries, his questions? _Why me? Where is in Seven Hells is Thancred?_ She pulled her fingers back on impulse before setting herself on the edge of the bed. “But neither am I. And there are many nights I would give everything to hear a happy ending.” She knew, then, that he understood the value of stories. She’d seen it for herself—early mornings he spent poring over tomes and tales, laughing or crying at each beat but always, ever turning the page. Deep down, he wasn't an academic first. He was a lover of literature. He had perhaps been a sort of bard long before he ever picked up a bow.

“Okay,” he said. He rolled himself back under the blankets and turned his back to her. She would have to have faith that he was listening.

She had faith. “Okay.”

Blue—Bas'ir—had gotten very good at crying silently over the years. It was a shame he could never retain the talent through his slumbering hours. But then, as Minfilia wound with words something childish, wholesome, non-threatening, and kind, he made the most of his bittersweet ability until at some point, finally, he drifted back to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bas Bahani: heh heh heh, this child shall openly bear the name I give him
> 
> Bas'ir:

**Author's Note:**

> HMU on Twitter @crystalsexarch
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. If you scream, that scream fuels me.


End file.
